Happy Friday! Saxey here again, looking to fantasy fiction, and plucking out one ancient fictional woman, and one modern real one.

I’ve been reading Old English poetry. The poem Beowulf is the big guns of Old English, so I’m saving it until I can read it with more confidence (and fewer trips to Bosworth and Toller’s Dictionary). But I’m intrigued by Maria Devana Headley’s new book, which rewrites Beowulf from the perspective of the antagonist, the monster-mother.

In most English language translations of Beowulf, aeglaec-wif is translated as some version of hag, hell-hell-bride, creature, while Aeglaeca, when applied to Beowulf, is translated as “hero.”  If we apply a different translation to the word, something like “fierce fighter” or “formidable,” things in the Beowulf story change, among them that Grendel’s mother can be seen as human.

https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/d6000325-394c-4f71-bc57-395abb51bb86/headley-interview

The author has treated herself to an amazing new tattoo of that ambiguous word: https://twitter.com/mariadahvana/status/1016364159867478017?lang=en

To really pin down the nature of Grendel’s mother, why not ask a bunch of teenagers to doodle a biro picture of her? Thijs Porck offers extra exam marks for a quick sketch. More scholarly commentary on the character, and illuminating diagrams of varying quality. (You can also see student renderings of Judith cheerfully cutting off the head of Holofernes, here.)

https://dutchanglosaxonist.com/2018/01/29/grendels-mother/

Moving forward a thousand years, to modern fantasy: author N.K.Jemisin has just made fiction history! She's the first author to win the prestigious Hugo award three times, in three years, for all three books of a trilogy.  Here’s her acceptance speech.

I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the Broken Earth trilogy come from. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m drawing on the human history of structural oppression, as well as my feelings about this moment in American history. What may be less obvious, though, is how much of the story derives from my feelings about science fiction and fantasy. Then again, SFF is a microcosm of the wider world, in no way rarefied from the world’s pettiness or prejudice.