In her right hand she hold a wooden quarterstaff, bound with blood-spattered iron. The belt beneath the cloak is styled somewhere between Celtic and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ interlace. The cloak is mostly sky blue and held together at the breast by a great, early medieval equal-armed cross brooch of gold and garnet inlay. She wears what appears to be fishmail armour beneath a richly textured but torn and worn cloak. Her expression, partially obscured by windblown hair-pale chestnut with a slight wave-is clear and farseeing: this is a woman who makes decisions that decide lives. She looks directly at the observer with blue-green eyes filled with a weight of experience beyond her years.

In the centre of the image, and taking up more than half of the total image area, is Hild. The pale blue banner in the foreground shows a stylised boar with garnet eyes. Behind Hild to the right, against a sky full of dark cloud and smoke, the arrows fall towards a host of spears and banners. Below the arrows and crows a mounted warrior charges from left to right, shield glinting silver, sword raised, face hidden behind a helmet. Behind her in the upper left, the top corner is golden, with white-hot tipped yellow arrows arcing overhead against what might be dark mountains or forbidding trees. The image is of a young woman-Hild, the protagonist of the novel-standing tall against an ominous backdrop of medieval warfare. Image description: Richly coloured cover of a novel, Menewood, by Nicola Griffith, painted predominatly in blue, gold, black, and red. If you have requests for what you’d especially like more detail on, drop a comment below and I’ll see what I can do.Cover of Menewood: A Novel by Nicola Griffith (MCDxFSG 3 October, 2023). Not to mention famine, parchment and ink production, long distance communication, water mills, the care and feeding and habits of horses, crop production, diplomacy, and, well, a zillion other things.īut honestly mostly I’ve spent time with maps, looking at vantage points, flooding, navigability, defensive sites, maintenance, and so on. I’ve had to figure out army logistics and guerrilla warfare. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time researching battles and fortifications. Will they go up or down? I don’t know yet.Īs I rewrite I’ll be posting thoughts here: research, maps-many, many maps maps are key-about settlement, travel, and battles. I’ll be rewriting soon-at which point all those numbers will change. But, wow, they are jam-packed years! Right the manuscript is 39 chapters, 1342 pages, and 285,500 words. Originally it was meant to cover Hild’s life from 18 to 33: marriage to joining the church.

The first draft of Menewood, the Hild sequel, is finished.