This piece was brought to you by Michael Roston.
If you are a female reader of genre fiction, you have probably gotten used to being dismissed. You are dismissed within the narratives of the stories you love, which all too often cast you as a lover or a witch, a virgin or a crone, a sexy plot-device on two long, supple legs; you are dismissed by half of the people who share your interests under the maddening label of fake-geek girlery. (Unless the genre you prefer is romance or young adult, in which case everyone dismisses you out of hand, because those are frivolous kinds of books for frivolous kinds of people, aka women, specifically young ones.)
The good news is that Nicola Griffith’s Hild is the book you’ve been waiting for, the one that has room for you in it: it’s long and smart and beautiful, set in a world so old that the languages and tribes feel supernatural in their distance from our own, and it’s expansively, gloriously, breathtakingly feminist, nearly six hundred pages of story about women that takes them and their complex, active lives seriously. It’s nominally about the woman who would become St. Hilda of Whitby, but the story covers only her early life, long before her eventual martyrdom. It’s not a catechism; instead it’s an exploration of the confluence of political power and mystical belief, and the way that a clear-eyed storyteller can shape her world and the world of those around her.
I love Hild—I have been singing its praises with obsessive fervor since this summer—and I want it to sell. So it’s hard to hate the marketing campaign that relentlessly compares it to Game of Thrones, even though it’s a comparison makes me want to die. I understand why it makes sense to start there: GOT has been a huge crossover success, theoretically because, per everyone’s imaginary boyfriend Ben Wyatt, “they’re telling human stories in a fantasy world.” It’s gotten a lot of people who don’t think they’re interested in fantasy to read thousands of pages of knights bearing standards going off to fight dragons and wights and walkers; the idea is that by invoking its name we’ll trick the reading public into taking on historical fiction, now, too.
But the best thing about Hild is that it’s nothing like Game of Thrones, and that, in fact, it succeeds in telling human stories—as it happens, women’s human stories—in a historical world, in a way that Games of Thrones resolutely does not.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the hell out of Game of Thrones. I am a high fantasy dork from way back, and one of my favorite side effects of its popularity is how it’s flushed Wheel of Time-reading friends out of hiding, all of us commiserating about the pain of loving something that just. won’t. end. But it is an absolute cesspit of rape and misogyny;
Sady Doyle made a handy list of every incidence of nastiness towards women, and I am deeply grateful to her for it, because now I don’t have to.
Suffice it to say: those are not human stories. They are stories about bodies, and ancestors, and the icons on standards carried into battle. They are stories about politics and monarchy and the will to power. George R. R. Martin’s books use people like playthings, like chess pieces on a black and white board. They do not develop character, and they have no interest in the fabric of everyday life.
Hild, on the other hand, takes a very literal interest in that fabric: Hild is born to a mother, Breguswith, who, like most high-class women of the time, is a weaver. The action of the loom is the metaphor by which Hild comes to understand the world: warp and weft, currents coming at one another from all sides and uniting to create the fabric of her universe. If you don’t know how to weave, cloth looks like a single unit, a cohesive and unbreakable surface. It’s only by studying the process of its creation that you can come to manipulate the strands, and change the picture that the pattern creates.
Breguswith teaches Hild this lesson over and over again: Hild is the daughter of a murdered king whose brother now holds power, and who’s favor she must curry without ever seeming to threaten his rule. So Hild becomes first his seer and then his Fist, and she does this by paying very careful attention to the smallest and most mundane things in her world. She learns the lessons of the loom, and of her mother’s work as a healer: women’s stuff, theoretically minor. She studies the natural world minutely. She uses all of this keen, careful observation (plus her own unerring intuition) when she advises the king, and on her wisdom armies fall and an empire rises.
But this isn’t some behind every great man kind of thing, an attempt to argue that women are controlling men’s actions whether they know it or not; instead Hild has a clear-eyed vision of the way in which even a world that seems, to us, impossibly divided by gender was of course mixed and complicated. Women shear sheep, wash the wool, card it, spin it, weave it into cloth. Men—kings—wear it when they ride through their territory, to flaunt their wealth, to subdue nascent rebellion. We call it women’s work and men’s worth, but that’s just another way of saying warp and weft. Without the both of them it’s just so much loose thread.
Fans of Martin’s argue that the rape (and molestation and misogyny) endemic in his work are nothing more than historical accuracy, and they do have a point. But his is a book that has dragons in it, and this is an old question but it’s always worth asking: why is it that a man can imagine flying, fire-breathing lizards, but he simply cannot get to a world in which women don’t live under the constant threat and fear of rape?
And the sad answer is that George R. R. Martin could imagine it, if he wanted to. If he’d ever had cause to think about what it would be like, to live with a body that is always a weapon waiting to be turned against you, he might have bothered. But it runs deeper than that: if he had ever been left out of a story—and not just one, but a hundred, a thousand, most of the stories he’d read in this life—he would know that stories are often full of shit, and the best historical record barely scratches the surface of what really happened, and that other people are far more fathomless and complex than imaginary battle choreography or whose ancestors descended from which tribes of legend. He would know that making stuff up is one thing but understanding what might have happened is really, entirely, another.
Nicola Griffith, on the other hand: she’s a queer woman with an interest in science fiction. Nicola Griffith knows that she, herself, exists, and yet she isn’t all that often on the record of culture, so she looks back at the past and knows that there must have been women like her, who existed, whose stories didn’t merit telling but who had full and important lives just the same. And so, in Hild, she applies herself to imagining them, and then to telling them. The book is long but quiet, focused on a handful of years, really, the unimportant beginnings of a minor saint. From that subject Griffith extracts easily as much fear and violence as Martin gets in his ever-expanding series—but she gets joy, too, and desire, and love, and the ways that love’s fierceness is, all too often, indistinguishable from cruelty.
It’s telling to consider each book’s major matriarchal figure: Martin’s Cersei, whose mother’s love is calculating, and whose ambition to be more than a pawn in marriage schemes is thwarted by own her useless vanity. (Or, fine, Catelyn, who loves her children so much that she sacrifices a crucial hostage for the slim hope of seeing one of them again, motherhood driving her mad.) Griffith has Breguswith, who is also calculating and sometimes cruel, but whose machinations work. She’s the widow of a king: her life is in danger and her children are in danger every minute of every day. She knows they can never make bold claims to power, but that under power’s wing is where they are safest.
She walks a fine and delicate line, and though she does absolutely horrible things, you cannot help respecting her for some of them, if only because she’s powerful enough to work her will so precisely. Which is to say: Cersei is diminished by her circumstances; Breguswith rises to them.
Martin takes women’s lives at face value: because we have historically been concerned with kitchens and cloth, he assumes that kitchens and cloth are all there is to it, and that only small minds could be so contended with small subjects. Griffith, on the other hand, knows what it means to be assigned to the hot stove, to be dismissed from the main action. She knows that there is meaning in cooking and weaving and tending to wounds, but also that when that’s what you have you find the meaning in it, because you are human, because your big storytelling brain demands it.
Genre fiction tends to encourage repeated plot structures, a sameness in narrative, that allows for the content to be imaginative and expansive: if you know what’s going to happen next, the world in which it happens becomes all the more crucial to the story’s success. Martin captured an audience by subverting narrative expectations, but at the end of the day it’s the same old song, just dragons and sluts and kings, writing a history where men are victors and women are victims.
It’s interesting, but it’s not original, and it is not the story of humanity, or at least any kind of humanity I recognize.
You have to let women speak, to tell human stories: you have to give them motivations other than their children or their vanity or their desire to get fucked. You have to believe that they play roles other than the ones their bodies insist on. You have to be interested, above all, in those people, in what it would feel like, to live a different life. No one has ever insisted that George R. R. Martin inhabit characters who are all that much unlike him; Nicola Griffith has had to all her life. Of course she’s learned empathy and imagination on a scale that escapes him and his work.
Tags: dragons are fantasy if there’s magical talismans or a magic swords or wizards or fuckin’ crazy not-real animals all these crazy not-real things that break the laws of reality that shit’s fantasy, game of thrones, genre fiction, high fantasy, hild, historical fiction, i’m into hard sci-fi, nicola griffith
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:fucking standing ovation:
Also thank you for that link to the Sady Doyle piece, which I will now staple to the faces of everyone who tries to tell me Martin “writes women SO WELL”.
Dude.
This sounds AMAZING.
YESSSSSSSS (Yes.)
You just made me want to read this book so so badly.
Yes. Please read this book. And pay money for it! Because I really wanna read the sequel. (Also on the feminist-epic-fantasy front last year, I really loved Emily Croy Barker’s The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic.)
Finished it today! It is so fucking good.
I just read that martin was inspired by a study showing that women spent 60% of their time making textiles. And she fully gets how essential that work was in a way that mainstream history doesn’t. A seminal study of yeavering counted every single weapon but completely ignores the women’s graves that were the best evidence of cultural change. Basically, this book should be required reading for ALL OF THE THINGS!
Martin, or Griffith? (i think you mean Griffith, from your context, but I want to make sure.)
Also, that is a lot of time with textiles. Yow.
Oh crap, Griffith. Clearly too filled with righteous rage to type clearly.
SO MUCH TIME! Maybe now the times when I take to my knitting and shun human contact can be justified as historical reenactment?
A Song of Ice and Fire would probably be better if all the sex scenes were replaced with textile-making scenes. I would have made it farther in before giving up.
Now I really want to read this! Me! The person who is all ambivalent about high fantasy!
I want this in wallpaper.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS.
I proselytize Hild to everyone I know, regardless of literary tastes, which is unusual for me. And my friends are baffled by why I’ve never much gotten into GoT. THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. Thank you.
Whelp, there’s my next bedtime read. This is a beautiful piece.
I’ve sent this to five different historian friends and thus far they have been too overwhelmed with love to email me back replies that were not in all caps and also incoherent.
I’m going to go out and make friends with some historians so I can do that, too.
“Fans of Martin’s argue that the rape (and molestation and misogyny) endemic in his work are nothing more than historical accuracy, and they do have a point. But his is a book that has dragons in it, and this is an old question but it’s always worth asking: why is it that a man can imagine flying, fire-breathing lizards, but he simply cannot get to a world in which women don’t live under the constant threat and fear of rape?”
OK, I get this, but I think Martin made a choice to make his world like this, and because so much of his books are from the female perspective, and because all of the women in Game of Thrones are so different and pretty well realized and are reacting to and navigating this brutally patriarchal world in such different ways, is what makes it compelling. AND I think he does a pretty good job of showing how patriarchy is harmful to men as well (esp. Tyrion and Jaime). I’m not saying it’s a perfectly feminist series all the time, but I think it’s unfair to say that it’s not because it’s set in that kind of world. Plus like, women NOW, in THIS world often live with a near constant fear of rape, so let’s not diminish that reality either.
I’m still going to read HIld though. I was planning to before this. I do agree that conflating the two is…weird. They’re not the same genre, even!
But there’s also a difference between choosing to build the society that way because that’s what works best on a narrative level (which he may or may not be doing, I don’t think it’s clear), and building it that way because “that’s just how it was,” which is how people defend it to others who say it makes them uncomfortable, which absolves him of having made that choice. I’ve read the books, and I didn’t hate them, but I don’t really plan on reading them again, either, because I don’t necessarily enjoy hanging out in a brutally patriarchal world (where nothing is ever resolved, which has nothing to do with misogyny and everything to do with a kind of storytelling I have come to intensely dislike).
You also have to keep in mind that the series is a response to fantasy’s tendency to never let anything bad happen to its characters, ever. And also I think the people who defend it that way don’t really understand all the other stuff that’s going on w/r/t the patriarchy in those books.
Maybe my interpretation is entirely wrong (but I think the text supports it), and it’s totally legit to not want to hang out in Westeros because of the type of place that it is, but that’s a personal preference!
And I am often the first (and/or only) person to defend the death of a major/beloved character, because stories where there’s no tension are boring, and if the story calls for a character to die, then do it and stand by it. I don’t entirely agree with your analysis, but I definitely see where you’re coming from.
It’s cool, you don’t have to! We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
I would definitely never say ASoIaF is not problematic, I just don’t think that aspect really has anything to do with it.
Hi! I just wanted to pop in to thank you for saying this. I really wanted to say something similar, but I ALSO didn’t want to step in as a dude and do so. I also think there are some patently false claims about the series made, like that men are the victors and women the victims, which… while the series hasn’t ended yet, it seems pretty clear at least some of the women will emerge with what they want (If anyone does, which is doubtful, honestly).
Anyway that’s enough defending Martin. (He’s definitely not perfect, and loves a detailed description of breasts to the point of exhaustion.) What I really want to read is someone taking down Martin’s depiction of race, because while I think he honestly tried not to, I also think he pretty much just plays right into typical fantasy depictions of race. (The Summer Islanders especially gross me out.)
Yeah, race is tricky. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy book that deals with it well, unless the author is a POC.
I do like how a certain character’s colonialist notions completely bite them in the ass though.
Very true. And I did like the way that character’s story plays out, completely taking any possible notion of them being a “righteous conqueror” out back and shooting it in the head. I just wish some of the people doing the biting in the ass were more filled-out characters.
I haven’t read all the books yet, but I watch the show and I remember thinking last season that GoT is a kind of patriarchal dystopia– it’s what the world would look like if “feminine” things like empathy, mercy, compromise and civil discourse were valued even less than they are, and basically every male character is sacrificing himself to a violent, power-obsessed code of honor. I think it’s kind of telling that everyone’s favorite character is Arya, who’s doing her best to become the best and most terrible man she can.
I guess I’m saying, the world is terrible and misogynistic, but everyone’s pretty miserable (even the ones who are *succeeding* in this world).
I really like this interpretation!
(I would disagree that everyone’s favorite character is Arya, though–I’d say that Tyrion would be the most popular choice. Interesting to think about how he fits into this interpretation…)
Mmm, interesting. Tyrion is not gender-normative according to Westeros just as a fact of his physicality-he cannot present as properly ‘male’ b/c that’s a heavily militarised, physically (strength, shape) determined construction there. Despite his virility-actually often seen as a weakness. I would love to argue that GRRM is working towards undermining these gender constructions with characters like Tyrion and Brienne, and the fact that one of the real powers might be Varys, but I don’t think that really holds-and it’s all just revolving around masculinity (or not) anyway.
I don’t think GRRM has to be consciously, intentionally undermining gender constructs for the interpretation to hold. As a dude who isn’t exactly hypermasculine himself, he’s perfectly capable of recognizing some of the shittier aspects of gender binaries and responding to it creatively without taking a gender studies class.
The essay pretty conveniently leaves out the whole Tyrell family (which isn’t so different from Hild’s family) and the Sand Serpents. One of the problems is that thanks to the show (which is much more tone deaf than the books, eg the final scene of season 3) GoT is the defining paradigm, after first being the subversion, so the backlash goes from “we need something different from X” to “X is wrong.”
I feel like GRRM has moved a bit according to criticism but we’ll have to see how it pans out. That’s a nice point about GoT becoming the paradigm rather than subverting it-so it will be great to see people working against it in the future.
I think the article above is partially in response to the marketing campaign for Hild, which seems intent on comparing it with GoT.
The thing about Martin, for me at least, is that I don’t have a problem with his general world of ‘shitty people being shitty to each other all the shitty time.’ What I don’t like is how over the top he goes with the sexualized violence, and his somewhat off-kilter descriptions of how the women in the world react to it. Case in point, I think Daenerys’ initial arc is supposed to be about her dealing with her terrible circumstances as best she can–i.e. learning to live with her raping/pillaging husband. However, any impact that might have is pushed aside from the incessantly sexualized descriptions of her, and the sudden shift to romance between her and Drogo. The choices he makes in terms of narrative focus or tone, not world, are what I find disconcerting.
Plus, the guy cannot write a sex scene to save his goddam life.
Oh my god, he so can’t. I pretty much just laugh my way through those.
Remember when he compared Cersei’s vagina to a myrish swamp?
I HAD FORGOTTEN ACTUALLY THANKS A LOT
Excellent, I needed something to read when I finished my current book (which is The Complete Kane Chronicles, because I enjoy YA Fantasy and I’m not ashamed of it). And I downloaded a sample of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic, per the comment upthread. Hooray books
No need to excuse loving YA fantasy. I think almost my entire literary intake of the past year has just been rereading my favorite YA fantasy books because I need the comfort. DEFEND YA TO THE DEATH.
Seconded. YA can be really good. Sometimes even better than non-YA. I’d take Diana Peterfreund over Dan Brown any day.
YAY! Any day I can get someone else to read a book I think is aces is a Good Day.
I read the Kane Chronicles with my kid and we loved it! I am so pumped that he is now old enough that we can read YA together.
Give it to me nowwwww. (Immediately added to my Goodreads list, will get it at the next available opportunity!)
Thank you, going to buy this right now! As a fan of both science fiction and fantasy, I just miss the women sometimes.
Can’t wait to buy this book! Thank you!
This sounds fascinating!
“But his is a book that has dragons in it, and this is an old question but it’s always worth asking: why is it that a man can imagine flying, fire-breathing lizards, but he simply cannot get to a world in which women don’t live under the constant threat and fear of rape?”
So much this. Not so much about GRRM, whose books I have not read and do not intend to read, so I can’t really judge the quality of his imagination in general. But because it is true about approximately 98% of fantasy and science fiction written by men; why are their imaginations ALL that bad? Yeah, that’s a very scientific number that I just completely made up, but seriously, why do men always need to set their writing in a world that is very different from ours, except for having the exact same patriarchy in it? Why?
It’s so I will someday actually follow through on my resolution to stop reading genre fiction by men, isn’t it? They’re just out there trying to support me in my misandry.
“but seriously, why do men always need to set their writing in a world that is very different from ours, except for having the exact same patriarchy in it? Why?”
God yes.
Oh Ms. Romanoff, I want to hug you for this.
I am a historian, and I tried reading A Game of Thrones in grad school, and I put it down because I felt like I was reading the box score of a chess match. It has about as much to do with medieval history as Call of Duty has to do with World War II: absolutely nothing, except in some sort of hyper-masculine fantasy.
One of my students told me about Hild last semester, and I have been saving it to read when I take a trans-atlantic flight next month. I am SO EXCITED.
Apropos of nothing at all, I once wrote a paper in my undergrad detailing what Call of Duty would be like if it was a realistic WWII sim and went on a long, extended discussion of how no one would buy it because 7/8ths of the game would involve A) filling out paperwork B) waiting in lines C) sitting around waiting for something to happen and D) complaining about shit.
Hahahaha. Hahaha.
That makes me want to write a “realistic” world war ii text entry rpg.
Congratulations! You have come to a new town in Germany:
Press 1 to secure the city from any hardcore Nazi hangers-on
Press 2 to accept the natives’ surrender
Press 3 to go to the Ratskellar and empty it of wine
Medieval POC has a really good analysis of how implausible GOT is, and why it’s bullshit to say “things were just like that back then.”
“Basically what I am saying here is that ASOIAF/Game of Thrones, is absolutely a post-colonial projection of colonial brutality into a quasi-Medieval setting.” http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/74505170627/th…
Requesting this from the library RIGHT NOW!
44 holds on 3 copies! noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!
I am going to go on a specially dedicated bookstore trip to buy this book and then love it to pieces. Thanks for this.
Ooh, I’m gonna make my book club read this.
I’ve always found Game of Thrones to be very cold. I describe the characters are gears in a large complex machine, rather than people. It feels like nobody has fun and everyone’s personality is a cardboard cutout. The gears serve the machine, not the other way around.
I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen a season or two of the show, and the character that bothers me the most is Daenerys Targaryen. She is an emotionless drone. A barbie doll given sentience. What irritates me the most about that, is her story SHOULD be the most interesting one, but her flat affect and paper thin personality destroy my investment in her journey. Maybe the books are better though. I have no idea.
I won’t completely defend GOT, but there is much more to Daenerys in the books. She has one of the firmest stances of morality in the series, if there are any. Her background as a refugee leaves her wanting to fight for the forgotten, but her inexperience leaves her with a difficult time trying to rule. She fights determining who to trust, who she can save, how to weigh danger against righteousness.
Yes there could be 100 less mentions of her boobs, but there is a lot more there than what can be glimpsed in the condensed HBO series.
Damn.
Wow, went to put this on my hold at my library and there are 112 holds ahead of me! That’s almost unheard of. Looking forward to reading it and really glad to see that it’s doing well.
Not to keep the focus on GoT, but it really grinds my gears how some people talk about that series as if it’s somehow the only ‘gritty’ fantasy series out there, and that gritty somehow means that one has to resort to rape as a shorthand for ‘dark and mature.’ While I liked GoT, GRRM resorts to such lazy writing in an effort to seem FCKING REAL, MAN. It’s tiring.
More importantly, though, GRRM isn’t the only game in town. He isn’t a one man revolution: there are plenty of SF&F writers of all genders who write similar veins without resorting to bland patriarchy and sexualized violence tropes. Steven Erikson’s in his Malazan series, for instance, kills off his own characters with even more gusto, but his world–while plenty terrible–is one generally devoid of patriarchy. Women serve as soldiers without everyone talking about for hundreds of pages, and there is one(ish) sexual assault in ten books, which is dealt with seriously and from the perspective of the survivor. It’s entirely possible to write a fantasy book that’s dark without talking about rape or a fourteen year old’s breasts every four pages.
I guess that just turned into a plug for the Malazan series. Go read that. Also Hild. Let’s all read Hild.
Yeah, I feel like there’s a trend of TV and movies going down that road too – “How do we make it edgier? I know, sexual violence!” Not saying it can’t or shouldn’t be dealt with ever, but damn…
It’s true. And when the edgy media bastards go down the rape road it’s always some smarmy yuckersmuck committing the rape and people are like, “Yeah, totally, that guy’s a rapist and I saw it coming”. Where’s the dude who you thought you could trust committing rape? Where’s the girl without the beat up face, the girl with zero traditional virtue, the girl of no consequence, no relation as wife-daughter-mother? TV and movies are so fucking boring sometimes.
it’s long and smart and beautiful, set in a world so old that the languages and tribes feel supernatural in their distance from our own, and it’s expansively, gloriously, breathtakingly feminist, nearly six hundred pages of story about women that takes them and their complex, active lives seriously
SOLD. *BUYS*
I just looked for Hild on my library’s website and every damn copy is checked out, on hold or in-transit. What is that thing people keep saying? Literature written by women about women, well, shit nobody wants to read that…is that what “people” are saying? Hahahahaha
I love this. Except I would add, it’s not our bodies that insist on those roles. We’re not defying nature by seeking to be more than virgins/mothers/crones, we’re fulfilling it.
“it’s not a catechism”
I think you mean ‘it’s not a hagiography’
catechism = summary of doctrine (relating to the sacraments, usually)
hagiography = story of the life of a saint, normally over-the-top and emphasising the holiness of the person concerned.
Also this book looks great. More of this kind of thing in general, publishers!
I am practically crying with joy right now because I love this genre of fiction so much and I am so tired of opening books and having them practically spit in my face with the onslaught of rape and misogyny and the constant “you-don’t-matter”. So excited to read this now!
This book sounds fantastic. I am going to buy it tonight because of this review. Please write all of the reviews forever.
Thank you so much for this highly readable, lovely and inspiring review. I'm definitely buying the book, partly because it's available in precisely zero libraries in Denmark, but also partly because you made me want to support an author who sounds like she's on the team of people like me. I'm very happy about that.
*reads half of article*
*stops reading article to buy book*
*resumes reading article*
Can we start a spoiler thread? I would like to discuss this with those who have read it! Especially the ending (which, granted, is just a pause, because hopefully there will be sequels)
Seconded.
I read this over the holidays and LOVED IT. So good. So worth it.
I read this over the holidays and LOVED IT. So good. So worth it.
Seconded.
Well, while Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series may contain elements of mythology on the fringes of its world (such as dragons in the far east and ice zombies in the far north), its primary narrative is very much rooted in medieval history, especially the War of the Roses and Jacobitism. And I’m sorry if it’s offensive and hard to read at times, but wartime during the middle-ages was brutal and bleak.
As the columnist mentioned, Martin is deliberately trying to break down a lot of the fairy tale romanticism that the fantasy genre has cultivated, and he is drawing on historical accounts to do that. Just because he has chosen to include magical elements in his story as well, I don’t think it’s fair to argue that everything else needs to be white-washed.
There’s a difference between depicting how a misogynistic society operates, and being a misogynist yourself. I also think the fact that at least half of Martin’s POV characters are female (often the most interesting characters), shows a dedication towards female subjectivity and struggle within this very male-centered world.