Chiswick Book Festival rewrites history

Ellen Alpsten; The Last Princess

1066 and all that, as seen from a female perspective

What is going on with this year’s Chiswick Book Festival? History is being retold from a female / feminist perspective.

On Sunday 14 September I am looking forward to interviewing Joan Smith about her book Unfortunately She Was a Nymphomaniac, in which she systematically unpicks the reputation-blackening stories about the women of ancient Rome, asking how it is that we have swallowed the idea that they were all scheming poisoners and murderers, manipulating their hapless menfolk, when in fact they were victims.

In what we would now clearly see as sexual abuse, the daughters of the patrician class were married off in their early teens to men twice their age and left to fight for their survival in a very brutal, male-dominated world.

Book tickets: Unfortunately She Was a Nymphomaniac

The other period of history to come under feminist / revisionist scrutiny is the Norman Conquest. Ellen Alpsten, who will discuss ‘Fearsome Females’ on a panel with Nicola Rayner on Saturday 13 September, has written a historical fiction about Gytha Godwinson, daughter of the Anglo-Saxon King Harold.

‘In a stunning re-telling of 1066, international bestselling author Ellen Alpsten has created a captivating new heroine in Gytha Godwinson. Witness the demise of a cursed kingdom and the emergence of a new empire. The Last Princess bridges myth and modernity’.

Book tickets: Fearsome Females, with Nicola Rayner & Ellen Alpsten

The titanic struggle between Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy is a fashionable subject, it appears. The BBC’s drama series King and Conqueror starts this Sunday on BBC One.

Ellen’s first novel was about the Empress of Russia, Catherine Alexeyevna, second wife of Peter the Great and founder of a dynasty of strong women, as the grandmother of Catherine the Great.

She was surprised when she started sharing her book about Gytha Godwinson, that people seemed to think the Anglo-Saxon period the preserve of male authors.

Ellen has written this piece about the experience, which first appeared in Historia.

The Bayeux tapestry, depicting the Norman invasion of England

Writing about 1066: a male club?

By Ellen Alpsten

Historians such as Marc Morris label this mother of all uphill struggles, where both the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons fought for England, as “The defining catastrophe of the British Isles”.

The epic fight between William the Conqueror and Harold II Godwinson set the clock to hour zero for modern Britain. Yet most of us have only a rudimentary notion of the exact on-goings, and recent TV adaptations either lose themselves in gore and glory or indeed focus on ‘King and Conqueror’.

No wonder: was there ever so much lost and won in the mere moment of a day, hitherto, and henceforward? Any author of historical fiction would home in on the subject, I thought when drafting my new novel, The Last Princess.

Any author? I soon stood corrected. Apparently, to be a fully-fledged author writing about the Anglo-Saxon demise, I lack a crucial couple of inches and some ladles of testosterone.

King Harold Godwinson; A stained glass window from Kirkwall Cathedral, Orkney 

Gytha Godwinson, the heroine of my new The Last Princess series, was on my radar ever since devising my Tsarina series. Why? Spoiler alert! Let us just say that in the planned trilogy, Gytha witnesses the end of an era, and rises from the ashes of a cursed kingdom, before she welds an empire of her own in the fire of change.

After long months of writing and arduous rewriting – one must do more than kill the darlings, one must twist and torture them, high middle-age style, which is Gytha’s age! – my novel was with the proofreader, and off I went to a party at London’s oldest bookshop.

Back to life, I thought, before I almost suffocated on my canape:

“You write about the Anglo-Saxons? That subject is for men only!”

Someone thrashed my ambitions. I can’t stop thinking about it ever since. Have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Bestselling fiction authors about the subject such as Bernard Cornwell and also George RR Martin (yes, the basic set up of Game of Thrones feeds on 1066, where the evil horse-eating hordes cross a channel and claim a throne) are of a different sex.

Women mostly publish non-fiction about the High Middle Ages: I read many, many of their works before I dared to pick up my own pen.

Going back in time a millennium is an enormous challenge. But then, who does not like a challenge? It also gives you great liberty, even if the Anglo-Saxons trod famously lightly on the surface of this earth, building in earth, wattle, and daub, and living in harmony with nature and its seasons: call it medieval mindfulness.

But research is the rigid, non-negotiable frame inside of which the story may swarm as the most colourful of images – an image I am determined to paint in The Last Princess. A reader gives me their most valuable – and that is not their money, but their time and attention. Will I, as a female writer of The Last Princess be worthy of this?

I turned to a medieval enthusiast Facebook group, asking: is writing about 1066 a male member’s club? Within minutes, a fabulous fight had broken out amongst the male and female members. Here are some of the quotes:

“Ask a war-gaming chatroom and you’ll have your answer!” “It happened at Hastings – was there a woman present?”

(If you read The Last Princess you’ll be surprised who Harold II was looking out for when the lethal bolt struck him right into his eye, splitting his skull and piercing his brain.)

“It’s all the swords – how can this be about women?” And so on.

The Bayeux tapestry, depicting the Norman invasion of England

It made my hackles rise – almost like the claim that Helen Mirren cannot play Golda Meir, because she’s not Jewish; or the critic who said I should stay off the Romanovs in my Tsarina series, because I was born in Kenya.

As are so many preconceived ideas, 1066, and especially whatever happened to the Godwinsons, as a male member’s club per se is ludicrous. Instead, it is all about one’s approach to a subject. Perhaps teaching and learning about the past, and history, ought to change?

My research reveals the run-up to 1066 as a family affair; like a Greek tragedy of Anglo-Saxon making, it’s not William the Bastard’s pride which seals the fate of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom, but a searing sibling rivalry. The Godwinsons were a feral pack, whose betrayal runs generations deep.

They owed everything to their women: The huscarl Godwin rose to influence because of his marriage with a kinswoman of Cnut the Great, the only ruler of the fabled North Sea Empire, which encompassed Norway, England, and Denmark.

Godwin punched far above his weight by ‘marrying up’. Harold II was their eldest surviving son and heir to Godwin’s House of Dragons – their heraldic beast is a two-legged, winged Wyvern, which also adorns the cover of The Last Princess as a cross-stitch embroidery.

But if Harold inherited his father’s lust for power, he lacked the funds, until his mother Gytha arranged for his ‘Danelaw’ wedding — simple hand-fasting, tying a couple’s wrists together at any given spot — to Edith Swan-neck.

The Bayeux tapestry, depicting the Norman invasion of England

Edith brought Harold England’s largest ever dowry: 250 hides, estates and their manors and bell towers. She offered Harold the fyrd, the simple soldiers whose fortunes rose and fell with him, and the geld, the rental income he required.

But when Harold’s sister — King Edward the Confessor’s Queen — bears England no son and heir, he is the lookout for somebody who can give him the other half of England, too. Ideally a woman – and this is where The Last Princess begins.

Given this set-up, there rarely seems to be a story which so merits a ‘female retelling’ – because the perplexing plot of Gytha’s life, and her later glory, is so unknown. Of all the Godwinsons, her bloodline survives to this day.

How come? Let me surprise you, which is the nicest thing about writing historical fiction! Even if we embrace historical determinism – the end is known – the art is in the telling of the story, and in creating its turning points.

I am writing book two in the The Last Princess trilogy at the moment and I love that, in a time when women had pre-conceived roles in society – cupbearer, peace-weaver, and memory-keeper – my gorgeous new girl Gytha Godwinson dares the unprecedented: she writes world history.

Ellen Alpsten, author of The Last Princess, will be appearing at the Chiswick Book Festival on Saturday 13 September.

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