Family is the cradle of the world's misinformation

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

I watched White Noise because Greta Gerwig was in the trailer, and I adore Greta Gerwig. The first hour was frustrating beyond belief as I couldn’t parse the dialogue or discern a plot. Everything everyone was saying made sense but the sentences all mashed into one another in an overlapping stream of consciousness that started to stress me out. It was—very literally—white noise.

This is also where I am with my research on Æthelflæd, Lady of Mercia and daughter of Alfred the Great. In the last week I’ve read several books and papers and am in awe of Æthelflæd, of history, and of the fact that we as humans have made it this far. I also haven’t sufficiently processed what I’ve learned into any kind of coherent narrative or set of ideas, making writing this week’s newsletter a bit of a challenge.

What’s been so utterly fascinating to me in this endeavor is just how precarious information is. At the time of Æthelflæd’s rule in the early 900s, one of the primary forms of historical documentation for the various kingdoms in England was through the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records the events of a year for approximately 1200 years. In the best of years you might get a paragraph or two, while other years are summarized in a single sentence. And while original copies of the Chronicle were made and shipped to monasteries throughout the island, scribes in various locations would copy the Chronicle (sometimes only up to a certain point) and then add in events more pertinent to their own geographical region. What survives today are seven different copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, from which so much of our understanding of this time period is derived. I’m still grappling with the implications of this, as it feels so tenuous and fragile as to almost defy belief.

I’ve also been neck-deep in the tension of my desire to create beautiful, educational historical fiction and also publish a weekly newsletter. In my mind I had assumed that they would be one and the same, but the reality is that this newsletter is better suited to a behind-the-scenes look at what I’m working on, a place where I can think aloud and toss out ideas without fully committing to them. I have pulled together a website where I’ll be publishing more polished work, but I’ll also share those links here in the newsletter.

On July 10th I start a writing workshop, the goal of which is to help me kickstart a historical fiction novel or collection of short stories. I’d love nothing more than to write a serialization centered on Æthelflæd, but that feels a bit too big for my first fictional writing venture (not least because historical fiction requires extensive research, and I could dedicate my life to understanding this woman). And so I’m leaning towards short stories, as they allow me to pick up pieces of the Viking Age, including Æthelflæd’s story, and work with them in a way where the stories may loosely connect with one another, but there’s no obligation to do so.

And so in addition to my research I’ve also been attending the Historical Novel Society conference, which has a series of master classes from authors that have pushed me in new directions. Monday night was a session on developing your setting as a character, and I walked away from the talk feeling like I had discovered an entirely new dimension to my mind. It’s even got me thinking about taking a trip to England to experience the locations where my stories take place firsthand.

I’m also toying with the idea of doing a map project. While I’m not a cartographer, I often find myself reading through the research with a map beside me in an effort to understand what the author is trying to convey. As I’m not from England the names of towns and highways and the locations of events is often lost on me. To complicate matters, England as we know it today was once a series of kingdoms with a multitude of rulers and constantly shifting borders, and I think it would be a tremendously interesting project to start mapping things out. Plus it would give me a chance to stylize the maps using some of the medieval illumination skills I’ve slowly been chipping away at.

The biggest hangup with the maps project is my printer, because of course I’m having printer issues. In creating an illumination, the first step is to settle on a design sketch that you like and to then print it out and transfer it to the paper or parchment via carbon copying. While I could start by drawing directly on the paper, it can really muck things up if there’s too much erasing (and I tend to erase a LOT), and best practice is to handle your paper as little as possible. It’s all in the process of being sorted, and I hope to have good news soon.

Until next week!

xo