We open on three-year-old Hild, lying, ear to the ground, absorbing the cadence of her world: birds, trees, earth. She is disturbed, though not frightened, by the arrival of her mother’s lady with the news her father, a would-be king, is dead. After all, ‘She was three. She had her own shoes.’

So begins Nicola Griffith’s sixth novel, Hild, based on an entry in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, about St Hilda of Whitby who lived from 614 to 680 AD and helped convert the English peoples to Christianity.

In Hild, Griffith creates an entry point to a Britain of the Dark Ages, one that has never been so vivid, so bright, so bustling with life and complexity. We are as immersed as Hild is in this polyglot land in a state of flux: ‘… their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich stirring … utterly unlike … otter swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.’

We travel with Hild in the retinue of King Edwin as he continually manoeuvres and battles to keep, and control, his kingdom of the north. We develop, as Hild does, an awareness of the powerful and vital alliances woven by her mother, which intertwine and sometimes diverge from Edwin’s efforts. Hild grows into the two worlds and takes us with her, absorbing the rhythms of both and the growing power of the coming Christian church and its written language.

What Griffith so vividly creates is a rich, sumptuous, foreign past, and a world complex enough to explain how the second daughter of a never-king might become the converter of a whole land. Women are not often the agents of early medieval fiction, and Hild leaves you wondering why.

Marie Matteson