Nicola Griffith’s Menewood is a magnificent, immersive sequel to one of my favorite historical novels, Hild.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“[A] masterpiece of immersion . . . Menewood is everything Hild was in terms of prose craft, depth of research and immensity of feeling. . . Menewood doesn’t feel like a sequel so much as the same book, the same life, spooling a little farther along its path. While I hope not to have to wait another 10 years for another volume, I trust that it would be worth it.”
In her own words, here is Nicola Griffith’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Menewood:
Wyrd Music
I’ve talked before about how, as a writer, music is for me an emotional signpost. With a book like Menewood—huge in every way; dense, wild, and contradictory—music becomes not just useful but vital. A lifeline.
Menewood is set in seventh-century Britain—what used to be called the Dark Ages. It is the second novel about Hild, the young woman with a will of adamant and a mind like a knife who becomes a leader of change and of armies, a counsellor to warlords and warrior kings, and is known today as St Hilda of Whitby. It is a novel of war—bitter war, total war with no rules of engagement—and spans four of the most tumultuous years in Northern British history: epic, intense and full of extremes. (Imagine it as a trilogy in one volume for a sense of what to expect.) Hild experiences almost every emotion a person can—love and lust, war and victory, grief and loss, belonging and savage joy—all while guiding others past their own fear and ambition. Through it all she grows and changes, learning to wield the power to make, break, and shape kings.
But Menewood is also full of quieter moments: peace, pleasure, contentment; forgiveness, friendship, and farewells. It is a book about life—how it feels, what it means, why it changes—set against the backdrop of total war and regime change. It revolves around a young woman becoming herself—learning to live life on her own terms; to build, hold, and understand power—exploring and really inhabiting who she is.
And woven into everything is wyrd. Wyrd: the ineffability of life. Hild’s world is steeped in it, blood and bone. What is will be. Fate goes ever as it must.
This playlist is as maximalist as the novel. The first part was largely whole albums and chunks of albums—interspersed with single, radically different tracks, as a kind of slashing shock—all chosen for a sense of lostness and search.
Felt Mountain — Goldfrapp. “Lovely Head”
The first track begins with human vocals electronically manipulated to elongate sound—like whale song circling the global deep, with strange, slow stops that themselves echo; a vast, alien call to…whom? To do what? And this is where I was at the beginning of writing the book: I knew what had just happened at the end of the previous novel, Hild, and I knew some of the major turning points of Hild’s life ahead, but I couldn’t quite decide at what point to begin the next part of her story. I felt unmoored; I needed an anchor point. Paradoxically I knew I needed to wander to find it. Hearing that high, lonely whistle put me inside a woman on the high moor of Elmet, in the cold of Wolf-month, as wind hisses like grit through frozen bracken. And something is coming…
The Serpent’s Egg — Dead Can Dance. “Chant of the Paladin” “Song of Sophia” “Echolalia”
This whole album is based on drones and vocals. I have no idea what language any of the lyrics are in and it doesn’t matter. These are songs of riding in the company of strangeness—leading men who are strangers to you and to each other through high wild places, handling sudden traps, both armed ambush and dangerous politicking. These three songs in particular took me through the scenes where Hild earns a new byname, Cath Llew, the great predatory lynx.
“Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag (12” version)”— Pigbag
Eventually, Hild finds herself literally between two opposing armies, in the middle of a battle that, rationally-speaking, is simply not survivable. This percussive piece, which hurtles along at an unsustainably high number of beats per minute—I’ve tried to count but always lose track—for over six minutes is similarly impossible to dance to, full tilt, beginning to end. But in my snorting amphetamine-and-dance-past-dawn days I would try anyway. For me it evokes the sheer insanity required of battle: knowing you can’t, knowing you must, setting your will to stun then just giving yourself to gore-glee and blood lust, the weight of muscle and bone; heart thumping and turning, turning, turning endless as a mill wheel as you plunge, lunge, jab stab thrust, on and on, step by step, cutting your way through the line, even as more enemies come, even as your limbs turn to lead and you can’t breathe and the light begins to gutter. On and on and on…
The Snow Goose — Camel. “Migration” “The Great Marsh (Reprise)”
The whole album tells a wordless story of a journey to a distant place, and return. This is music from my deep past, feeling the physical turmoil and inner alienation from self of adolescence. “Migration” is the only track with vocals—they are wordless—though there are many flutes and other instruments that sound like voices. It begins with a rapid, light roll on the snare, like a drumroll before the curtains fly open to reveal wonders, or a bird’s heart racing, rising, as it leaps into flight and soars in the endless air, free of all earthly constraint. The final track mirrors the cold mere Hild stares into when grief and grievous injury have hollowed her. Her light has gone out.
Karelia Visa — Hedningarna. “Viima”
I started with the whole album but in the end would play just this single track, on repeat, sometimes for hours. Viima means “cold wind,” and the Swedish/Finnish Hedningarna use the drone and skirl of bagpipe-like wind instruments and the uncanny dissonance of the wordless women’s voices to evoke Hild howling emptiness…and then the slowly gathering sense of purpose, a new understanding of the task ahead.
Meddle — Pink Floyd. “One of These Days” “Echoes”
The driving, doubled bass on the first track is all about purpose, but this time it’s towards life—Hild is rebuilding her hidden community, getting ready for the second phase of the war, feeling the world come alive all around her: crops growing, birds fledging, sun breaking out from behind the clouds. But the dialy rhythm is not her wyrd; her wyrd and gift is to understand what others can’t, to find the quiet place and listen. The last track begins with the ping of sonar and moves through the wuther of wind and cry of the great albatross as Hild casts her mind loose to soar, to skim over the daily crests and troughs and rise to the realisation of the startling strategy and unexpected alliances that will change the world. Here, too, is where the playlist changes…
“(Making the Run to) Gladewater” — Michelle Shocked
Hild’s task now is almost impossible—but she’s young and healthy, she’s strong and fast and bursting with vitality. This is a song of joy and recklessness, all set to that wonderful walking baseline and Texas twang that conjures the scent of just-cut hay, the tick of a cooling pickup engine in the moonlight, and the clink and laughter of young people happy to be becoming themselves.
“Bottom of the River” — Delta Rae
How to describe this song… Haunted folklore blues? Mythological Americana? Muddy delta gospel? It’s earthy and fecund and humid. It is rooted and uncanny at the same time—and it’s so full of raw life that you could plant an empty bottle in it and grow moonshine. It shouldn’t work but it does.
“Bang a Gong (Get it On)” — T. Rex
Again this a song of rhythm and relish, with the glassy brilliance of piano glissandos and raunchy horns—mostly sax, alto and soprano. It’s definitely a life-will-find-a-way song.
“Like the Way I Do” — Melissa Etheridge
This is a scorching, life-will-burn-you-and-you’ll-love-it song. It’s an absolute heart-on-fire cry of lust and jealous rage. It’s fabulous.
Bones UK—Bones. “Choke” “Creature”
All the songs. This is music scented with beer spilled on bare boards, glistening with sweat, humming like that one, about-to-blow amp, and stomping like the kings of the tiny kingdom that is a small-time music venue. This is the music swollen with desire—sometimes thwarted, sometimes twisted, but buzzing and alive. But also being one step back from that desire: a thinking, calculating mind at least partially at the helm of the often ungovernable body. I started listening to this band during the pandemic after I’d used my stimulus cheque to buy a recumbent cross trainer and needed something with just the right bpm for the mix of cardio and endurance exercise—so this is one album where I’ve actually listened to the lyrics (a good distraction from burning muscles). They’re not poetry but they’re sometimes clever and often effective.
“Make Me Feel” — Janelle Monae
This is an absolutely uncomplicated song about sex and delight. Life at its best. This is bopping along the valley, singing, leaping and tagging the branches overhead just for joy, laughing out loud as two birds swoop for the same dragonfly. I cannot listen to this song without either typing in rhythm or, if I don’t want to shape my sentences to its bounce, lifting my hands off the keyboard and dancing in my chair.
“Raise Your Hand (U Got To)” EP [Club Mix] — Ike and Tina Turner
I’ve never really listened to the lyrics but the title, to me, suggest it’s about seeing something that needs doing and rather just complaining about it, or wishing things were different, deciding somebody has to do something about it. And, well, ooof, who else is there to do it but you? There’s an old axiom from some country I’ve never visited—Azerbaijan? Armenia?—about taking the worry from your head and putting it on your shoulders. This song feels like that saying made concrete: if you’re dreading or worrying about something, do something about it. It will give you a renewed sense of energy.
“Come Together” — Gary Clark Jr & Junkie XL
This song never made a lick of sense to me when the Beatles sang it but done this way it’s a call from the leader, the guru, the young prince who leaps into her saddle and cries, “With me!” And rich and poor, firm and infirm, heathen and Christian unthinkingly follow that persnal magnetism: she will take them where they need to go, she will save them.
“Let’s Burn Down the Cornfield” — Lou Rawls
Swamp nihilism? Burning roots music? A certain savage joy in destruction. But also, perhaps, necessary destruction—burning off the stubble to make way for the new crop that will follow. A deceptively simple song, both difficult to pull off and worth every effort—and afterwards the world resettles into a new and righteous path.
“Feeling Good” — Nina Simone
This song is one of the best musical expressions of relief, joy and freedom I have ever heard. It’s about crossing into another life, to begin again, remade, to move ahead under your own control. It is a song about finally stepping out from under the burden of others’ control and demands and expectations. It’s about seeing a new path. A different way. This song is on almost every playlist I have ever built. A good way to end.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Nicola Griffith’s playlist for her novel Hild