Hild: A Novel [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00H861I3M | Format: PDF, EPUB
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A brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild. In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying.
Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world - of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next - that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.
Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become over-king of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king's seer. And she is indispensable - unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future. Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages - all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith's luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life.
Direct download links available for Download Hild: A Novel [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 23 hours and 37 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: December 17, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00H861I3M
I don't know where to start. I read a lot, generally at least two books a week. I love large, thick books that can take awhile to read. When I love a book, the longer it lasts the better it is! I read with enjoyment. I don't spend my reading time with anything that I don't enjoy, which is why I seldom give books less than 3 stars here or on any other site on which I post my reviews. Actually, most of my reviews are 4-5 stars. This one should have at last 7 stars by that reckoning. Some books, very few actually, are finished but stay with me, like the after taste of a particularly fine something .. wine, chocolate, a favorite dessert or meal. This book is staying with me, and I am wishing that the sequel was already available so that I could continue to savor the reading.
Ms. Griffith is a master at prose. This book, in places, reads more like poetry, each word so finely tuned that they sing like a finely tuned violin or as the voices in a perfectly pitched acapella.
I have to admit to having a few issues with the uniqueness of names and places in this seventh century world that we enter when we open this book, but it did not take long for me to fall into the book and become one with the pages and the story.
We step into the story of St. Hilda, but this story gives so very much more. We walk in the life of the seventh century. We go to the dairy house and help make butter, we smell the torches, hearth lights and the blood of war. We feel the tensions of King and thegns, the stress as the old, polytheistic, religions give way to the new, Christ, religion.
Hild the child that would become Saint Hilda of Whitby. Griffith's novel illuminates the person Hild might have been in her earliest years. The known is cleverly interwoven into the storyline. Hild's father, Prince Hereric, was nephew to King Edwin of Northumbria. He was poisoned. Hild was brought up in the court of King Edwin.
Hild's wyrd (personal destiny) is her path. She is 'Light of the World'. She carries a seax, a type of dagger, and she stands tall.
Her sister Herewith's wyrd is different. She will be a queen.
I found it hard to resolve the description of Hild in her very young years. She is marked as special from birth. A child heavy with her future wrapped around her. Even as young as three, Hild's clarity of thought and perception is prodigious, and later as still a child not yet come into her womanhood, her wisdom is more like that of a mature woman. After all wisdom is what Hilda of Whitby will become renowned for, along with having contributed in the christianizing of Britain.
In this fictional account of Hild's life, just as the Irish priest Fursey did, I found it sad that Hild was never allowed to be a maid, young and carefree. Her feet are set on her path from birth, thrust there by her wyrd and kept there by her mother, Breguswith.
Seer to a King, a prophet, Hild learns early to watch and understand many aspects of her world, be it nature, animals, the wind, the season for plants, the stars, the flow of the rivers. She studied behaviour, carefully watching people and identifying their tell-tail tags, gauging their interactions and reactions. Hild studies the languages of the various peoples of her land, including the roman priests. She learns to read and values the gift of communication it is.
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