I confess, I haven’t read Nicola Griffith’s Hild. But I most certainly will, after finding  (in Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s blog Work In Progress) this excellent article about the research and thought process that went into crafting the novel’s language.

I greatly admire Ms. Griffith’s vivid depiction of her approach to… not so much recreating period language, as rendering its feel – and its social and psychological implications as well.

So much so that Hild’s time period may not be my favourite, but I just have to read a book written this way.

I’ll let you know.

Related articles

• With Nuanced Beauty, ‘Hild’ Destroys Myths Of Medieval Womanhood (npr.org)
• We All Have Our Magical Thinking: An Interview with Nicola Griffith (theparisreview.org)