Today Menewood is for sale in paperback in the UK!¹ Go buy a copy! If you’d rather know more before you buy, go read Part One of my two-part examination of the battles of Hatfield and Deniseburna,² complete with some nifty maps, and my own (deliberately literal—you’ll see why when you read the piece) translations of Bede’s Latin:

Menewood is set in early 7th-century Britain. It is a book about war — bitter war, winter war — book-ended by two famous battles. These battles are attested by a variety of chroniclers, some of whom are regarded as at least occasionally reliable (Bede, Adomnán), and some, well, not so much. As written, one battle makes complete sense; the other, though, is a problem: it relies on divine intervention.

Battles, of course, are just a small part of the massive and wide-ranging project that is war. To succeed, a leader — in the case of Menewood, Hild, also known as St Hilda of Whitby — must harden their defences; negotiate alliances; survive defeat; gather and grieve with other survivors; learn from their losses; and rebuild.

While rebuilding, they must form a new set of alliances, create new power structures, and then recruit, train, plan, supply, and lead those who will join with them to successfully prosecute a war, to survive that and minimise the horror, and then to move through and past that violence to a hope for a better future. If there was anyone in early 7th-century Britain who could do that, it was Hild…

It looks as though the Historia piece might be missing the links that would take you through to larger image files of the maps, so I’ll repost those maps below—and they do link through. Enjoy!

I’m not sure when Part Two will be published, but that, too, will have some nifty maps. And I’ll link those through onthe corresponding post.

1. It is also, coincidentally, Hild’s Feast Day—at least in the Anglican Communion. The Roman Catholic date was yesterday, and to mark that occasion I wrote a long post on my personal blog about how and why Hild, Whitby, and ammonites have marked me, and especially my work, indelibly. ↩︎
2. You could also read this lovely 4,000 word critical review essay of both Hild and Menewood in the New York Review of Books. ↩︎