The stomach-growling smell of roast meat, the hit of mead, the arm-ache from embroidery; wind, rain, fruit in the hedgerows: details like these are the ‘little’ extras that add more period and atmosphere to your story, says MJ Porter, author of Anglo-Saxon period historical fiction.
In Warrior of Mercia, the third book in the Eagle of Mercia Chronicles series, I tried ‘composing’ a scop tale for one of the characters, using modern translations and chopping and changing some of the themes found in the surviving texts. These were very heavy on references to wolves, blood, ravens, eagles and corpses, and actually dated to after the period I’m writing about, but they are what has survived.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but I’m finding that increasingly I’m confident to use those ‘little’ extras that add more period and atmospheric details to the story I’m telling. Here’s some of the final version of the scop song told about the Viking raiders by one of my Mercian characters:
‘You carried the shield of war and so dealt death mightily, giving swollen flesh to the raven and marking men with the print of the sword’s edge. There was food for the ravens from the spears as you fought. Red spears soared as you fought on. Eagles flew over the rows of corpses left in your wake, and beaks of the ravens dripped red while the wolves tore at wounds. You offered Mercian corpses to the wolf by the sea.’
(This was composed using translations found in The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century, edited by Judith Jesch, and also two poems translated in English Historical Documents 1 by Dorothy Whitelock.)
Having looked at several different texts for the period, I definitely went all out with the imagery that I used. The entire scop song is drenched in blood, to terrify my characters about just what they might face in battle when defeating their enemy, the Viking raiders.
As my readers, and indeed, as I, am not an expert on Viking-era scop songs, I had to incorporate more vivid imagery into my tale than the original composers might have used. We don’t live in a society where such imagery would be commonplace, and so, some of the points had to be laboured.
To make a story of the Saxon period feel ‘genuine’ for readers, there are a few elements that always seem to have to be involved. If you’ve read Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon stories, then one of those elements is definitely the vagaries of the British weather – for a long time, I thought it only ever rained in Saxon England, and, therefore, it could always be muddy. And yet, this is one of those elements that does need to be included, although it doesn’t always have to be raining.
The British weather is particularly seasonal – indeed, if you look at some of the ancient names for the months, such as that for March, Hre∂mona∂, (windy month), it reflects our ancestors’ preoccupation with the weather, which would have had a huge impact on their agrarian society.
And of course, the weather isn’t the same universally throughout Britain. I was raised in the Midlands (hot and airless in the summer), and now I live by the North East coast (windy in the summer – a lot of the time). If I travel back to the Midlands in the summer, I’m immediately struck by just how airless it feels. All these little details add to the environment of my characters and make the world I’m recreating appear more real to my readers if they happen to mention it themselves.
Equally, the food that my characters ate would have been different to how I eat today. This might seem obvious, but even here, there are small elements to tease out into the story.
I recently attended a medieval feast, complete with pottage and suckling pig, and well, I might have written this line prior to the feast, ‘Pork on the way out smells much as pork on the way in. It’s making my stomach growl hungrily, and that disgusts me even more,’ but I was proven even more right.
We were also treated to some mead at our feast. I don’t drink alcohol, but I was determined to try it, and oh wow, it was particularly potent. Again, something to remember when a young character gets their first mouthful of the stuff. And perhaps something to consider if you have a character who likes their mead – how much would it actually take to be rip-roaringly drunk?
Of course, in stories of this time period, warcraft, weapons and shields, as well as protective equipment are particularly important, as is the decoration on them.
I recently travelled to see some of the Staffordshire Hoard on display at Tamworth Castle, and I was struck by how shiny the metals were (admittedly, they’ve been extremely well conserved and are displayed in such a way that the golds are unmissable), but all the same, the intricacy of the design and the minute detail are also something that can add to the tale being told.
I also went to see the Lindisfarne Gospels and was struck by the detail of the decorative designs. Again, we can look at these things in books and on the internet, and the impact will be no less effective. All these little thoughts and ideas that we have when faced with such objects and experiences can ‘add’ the extras to our works of historical fiction – are we astounded by the colours, the textures (if we can touch them), the realisation of how much labour was involved in creating them? If we are, then surely, our characters would have been so as well.
In the spirit of learning more about common elements of the Saxon period, I also attempted a bit of Bayeaux Tapestry-type embroidery – not very successfully – but I’m not very ‘crafty’ anyway. Still, it taught me that no, you couldn’t undertake such a task when the lighting is poor. It also made me appreciate that if you embroider a great deal, your shoulder will probably hurt from the repetitive nature of the task.
I think many of us will try and ‘walk’ in the steps of our characters, and there’s a huge desire to visit places that our characters might have been, but the further back in time we go, the harder this can be. Our landscape has massively altered in the intervening period; roads, farming techniques, and the number of large settlements have all significantly altered what we see now as opposed to what would have been seen then.
We can’t even rely on our rivers to be in the same place (especially not when canals have been created to connect the UK river systems), and certainly, changing sea levels and the draining of some areas, such as the Fens, have had an enormous impact.
During the lockdown of 2020, I did something I’d not done before – and it sounds a bit bizarre that I hadn’t – but I took to walking the country lanes close to where I live. To begin with, it was all too much of an effort, but slowly I began to see where I could incorporate yet more elements into my story.
As I’ve said, I live close to the coast, and it’s often windy, but which way the wind’s blowing makes a huge difference to how I felt, was the wind in my face or on my back, and what might I see in the sky? Were the birds flying straight? Trying to fly with the air currents? Were the fields ripe with crops? Denuded after harvest? Just beginning to grow? Were they green, brown, yellow or blue?
And the hedgerows? Well, the hedgerows of 2020 were very different to those of 2021, and in comparison to 2022, when everything was too dry, the berries of both 2020 and 2021 were rich and abundant.
For my character, Icel, a healer when we first encounter him, such changes would have impacted what was and wasn’t available to treat ailments.
And so, quite by chance in some instances and on purpose in others, I’m now working all of these ‘new’ elements into my stories alongside the scant historical record for the period of the 820s and 830s in Mercia.
I regularly attend online lectures, I read widely, and I walk through the local countryside, not because it’s the countryside of my characters, but because, as everyone would have travelled on horseback or by foot, it’s fascinating to experience as much of the same as possible.
The desire to make my world as ‘lived’ in as I can is only adding to the historical stories I can tell.
Warrior of Mercia by MJ Porter, the third in the Eagle of Mercia Chronicles series, is published on 9 November, 2022.
Find out more about this book.
MJ has written a Historia feature about the background to her series, Rival kings and the fall of Mercia.
Other similar features you might like include:
In Search of Mercia by Annie Whitehead, author of Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War by Edoardo Albert
Images:
- Crumpled sheet gold decoration from the Staffordshire Hoard: daves_archive1 for Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
- St Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels: The Yorck Project for Wikimedia (public domain)
- Odin bringing the stolen mead to gods and humans: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Swords and hilt decorations from the Staffordshire Hoard: daves_archive1 for Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
- Embroidery by the author, MJ Porter
- Hedgerow with berries by St David’s Well, Nottage: eswales for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)