‘981 AD. The Viking King of Dublin is dead. His young widow, Gormflaith, has ambitions for her son – and herself – but Ireland is a dangerous place and kings tend not to stay kings for long. Gormflaith also has a secret. She is one of the Fomorians, an immortal race who can do fire-magic. She has kept her powers hidden at all costs, for there are other immortals in this world – like the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of warriors who are sworn to kill Fomorians.
Fódla is one of the Tuatha Dé Danaan with the gift of healing. Her kind dwell hidden in a fortress, forbidden to live amongst the mortals. Fódla agrees to help her kin by going to spy on Brian Boru, a powerful man who aims be High King of Ireland. She finds a land on the brink of war – a war she is desperate to stop. However, preventing the loss of mortal lives is not easy with Ireland in turmoil and the Fomorians now on the rise…
The first in a gripping new historical fantasy series that intertwines Irish mythology with real-life history, The Children of Gods and Fighting Men is the thrilling debut novel by Shauna Lawless.’
In an afterword to her debut novel, The Children of Gods and Fighting Men, Shauna Lawless explains that she was asked many times why she decided against writing either a straight historical fiction series set in early medieval Ireland, or a total fantasy series in a world of her own creation. In response, Lawless affirmed that ‘it was the merging of the Irish myths and Irish history that gave the story its soul’, adding that any fictional history of Ireland at the time of the Vikings, the early Christians, and Brian Boru that neglected the rich legends of the Tuatha Dé Danaan would represent a hollow endeavour. Lawless’s synthesis of actual historical figures and events with the mystery and magic of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danaan is a formidable achievement; her particular blend of history and mythology is well justified and meticulously researched. Re-imaginings of classical myth have been enjoying a spell in the sun in recent years, drawing on the foundational status of the Greek and Roman gods, goddesses, monsters, and heroes in western culture. Irish mythology lacks this referential ubiquity; even within the Irish education system, knowledge of native myths and legends is limited to certain stories about the Children of Lír, Cúchulainn, and Na Fianna. These stories have survived in medieval manuscripts that meld pagan and Christian narratives in complex ways; these tales can seem unmoored from the ancient oral tradition of sagas to which they belong, and which have been attenuated over the centuries. In other words, Lawless’s innovative marriage of history and myth operates under none of the advantages of classical myth, lacking pre-Christian source texts and labouring under widespread popular ignorance. These challenging circumstances make Lawless’s feat all the more impressive: in a debut novel, she succeeds in revivifying an age of fractured identities and uncertain cultural fault-lines, giving imaginative and nuanced animation to the long-dead and seldom remembered names of Ireland’s early medieval history, too often dismissed in the popular cultural psyche as a centuries-long homogenous blur of rape, pillage, and misery. Furthermore, the exposition of the world of the novel is elegant and restrained, free of the kind of excessive contextualisation that can weigh the genre down.
In The Children of Gods and Fighting Men, Lawless alternates narrative perspectives, shifting from the voice of Gormflaith, one of two surviving Fomorians and mother to Sigrid Silkbeard, Viking King of Dublin, to that of Fódla, one of the descendants of the mythological Tuatha Dé Danaan, who have withdrawn from interaction with mortals and live in an enchanted fortress on the southwest coast. In Irish mythology, the Fomorians were an ancient race of supernatural beings, frequently cast in a hostile or monstrous light. Their settlement on Irish shores predated the arrival of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, a godlike race who may represent the pagan deities of pre-Christian Ireland. Ancient stories of Irish settlement tell of the devastating wars between the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, but also of the occasional intermarriage of the races, resulting in figures of blended heritage like the heroic leader Lugh. Lawless’s novel takes place centuries after the initial conflict between the Fomorians and Tuatha Dé Danaan, when the mortal tribes of Gaelic and Scandinavian descent have taken political precedence. However, the descendants of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danaan retain their supernatural powers, and Gormflaith and her brother Maelmórda live in terror of being hunted and killed by Fódla’s former partner, Tomás and his associates. The dual narrative enriches the novel with compelling moral complexity, destabilising readers’ sympathies: Lawless’s iron-veined female protagonists, who remain largely unknown to each other until the novel’s conclusion, are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and are motivated by primal familial instincts that cannot but endear them to the reader. As their fortunes are aligned respectively with those of the Vikings and the native Irish royalty, Lawless sustains an impressive narrative tension, delineating the merits and atrocities of each tribe without pronouncing moral judgement on either. In this respect, the quasi-flirtatious verbal rallies between Fódla and Murchad, son of Brian Boru, and between the Gormflaith and the Viking warlord Olaf, are engaging and illuminating in dramatising the tribal, political, gender-based, and moral quandaries raised by the events of the novel.
The characterisation of these protagonists is one of the novel’s most significant strengths. Gormflaith’s narrative opens the novel in a richly evocative passage that melds sex and death in sensuous, dangerous ways:
‘Amlav’s armour, sword and axe gleamed as if new. His bear, washed and bathed in lavender-scented oils, glistened in the soft candlelight and curled elegantly over his chest. I leaned forward and rubbed my finger over his lips, down his cheek, until I touched the wolf-fur cloak which covered the stone slab he lay upon. Only a stray lock of hair that had fallen across his forehead marred the effect. The nuns had dressed him well, but it was my duty, as his wife, to ensure he crossed over the the afterlife looking like a king. I pushed the curl back, sweeping it into line with the others.
Once satisfied, I smiled.
Lying down, eyes closed, had always been the way I preferred Amlav. But this was better. Death had a finality that sleep could only imitate.’
In many ways, Gormflaith’s characterisation is reminiscent of that of Cersei Lannister in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series Game of Thrones. Like Cersei, Gormflaith is serpentine in her weaponisation of her own sexuality and her political manoeuvring, but lupine in her maternal ferocity, and remorselessly murderous in her ambitions for her son. Lawless is astute in opening the novel through Gormflaith’s eyes; though Fódla quickly becomes the more obviously sympathetic protagonist, the magnetism of Gormflaith’s glittering menace draws readers in league with her schemes despite their best instincts. At times, I did wonder whether third-person narrative strategies or free indirect discourse might have rendered Gormflaith all the more compelling; the unfettered access to her consciousness granted by the first-person perspective borders on excessive transparency. Gormflaith’s commentary on her own motives, reactions, and interactions with other characters sometimes left too little to the reader’s imagination. For example, the resentment Gormflaith feels towards her mother is over-egged somewhat, and the ease with which she manipulates other characters, particularly men, can be difficult to credit. I can understand Lawless’s impulse to frame her novel from a woman’s point of view, and it must have been highly enjoyable to adopt the voice of such an unscrupulous, ferocious queen. Nonetheless, I suspect that Gormflaith’s character may have benefited from a degree of impermeability, a volatile mystique facilitated by narrative distance. Although the same could be said for Fódla, and Lawless could well have developed distinctive third-person narrative voices inflected by the experiences and preoccupations of her two protagonists, the more conventionally sympathetic and humane aspects of the latter’s character rescue her from the impulse to over-explanation prompted by Gormflaith’s apparent ruthlessness, cruelty, and arrogance. Despite this qualm, both women serve as fascinating lenses through which to view the fragility and brutality of tenth and eleventh century life, and Lawless is deft in her destabilisation of ideas of historical female powerlessness. The key forces that drive the novel’s action, including both Fódla and Gormflaith’s protective maternal instincts, invert inherited ideas of the early medieval world as a relentlessly masculine and martial sphere, in which women were frequently consigned to victimhood and martyrdom. Although the misogynistic narratives of the Christian Church are seen to hold a tight grip over the cultural and political mores of the novel, and although the sheer violence of the spheres of war and kingship is undeniably patriarchal, Lawless insists on the implicit political capital of her female protagonists, and refuses to underestimate their influence over their allies and their foes. That is not to say that Lawless indulges in feminist revisionism, or hollowly empowers her female characters beyond the parameters of historical plausibility; the women of The Children of Gods and Fighting Men are endlessly vulnerable to the atrocities of war, rape, slavery, the dangers of childbirth, and the political ambitions of their male relatives. Nonetheless, even in the heartwrenching story of Onguen, a Cornish slave turned Viking queen, Lawless is firm in her emphasis on female agency and complexity, joining the ranks of authors such as Madeleine Miller, Pat Barker, and Natalie Haynes.
Stylistically, Lawless’s writing is generally smooth and confident, albeit bearing some of the hallmarked self-consciousness of the debut. The world of The Children of Gods and Fighting Men is brought to life with impressive sensory richness and powerful imagery, but the novel may have benefited from an editor with a stronger hand, who would have been willing to trust in the power of silences and lacunae. Minor editorial carelessness slip into the narrative, including: ‘The number of men he’d slain in his prime numbered over a thousand.’ Some of the dialogue can seem jarring, and lacks the smooth fluidity with which Madeline Miller treads the line between historical plausibility and excessive archaism when giving voice to her characters. As a final qualm, the novel is peppered with small lapses in realism, that can detract from the cinematic vibrancy of the prose, as evidenced by this description of a conversation between Gormflaith and Olaf:
‘Lowering my gaze, I stared at his reflection too. His tattoos merged into a bluish haze as the water rippled, but his eyes, blue and piercing, stared right back.’
While it is fair to say that anyone familiar with the pewter waters of Ireland would struggle to credit this imagery, such criticism could well be deemed mean-spirited in the context of a novel suffused with the supernatural, particularly when Lawless’s prose is generally vivid and gripping, and certainly of a higher standard than is often the case among writers of fantasy. The novel does glint with polished aesthetic touches, like the ivy handcuffs that bind Fódla’s sister as she appears on trial before the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Lawless is especially convincing in the martial segments of the book; the hand-to-hand gruesomeness of early medieval warfare is brought to life with a bald and gritty toughness
that works well to counter the impulse of romanticisation that plagues Celtic myth – even if it does appal the senses:
‘It made me wonder how much pain he would inflict on us today. I didn’t have to look too far to understand the depths of his wrath. Five hundred of our slaves ay dead on the grass below me. At a guess, I’d say eighty of Sechnall’s men lay beside them. I supposed it wasn’t a bad result for untrained slaves. To their credit, not too many of them had shit themselves before the enemy drew their swords, though judging by the smell, a great many had since.’
I have previously described the quality of the prose as cinematic, and there are passages of impressive quality in which Lawless blends emotional tension, atmospheric clarity, and transportive sensuousness with mesmerising effect:
‘Thick grey clouds swarmed across the sky, bearing down on the blue-grey sea. The green rushes by the sand dunes swayed and flattened with every gust, almost as if to lead the way to Olaf’s boar. Twenty soldiers rode with me in silence along the coastal path. I could smell their tear their longing for the warm fires of their homes, the soft flesh of their wives. If they were lucky, Olaf had come under Sigurd’s orders, and there would be no fighting. If not, few of them would return home.’
Overall, The Children of Gods and Fighting Men is an impressive debut that is compelling from the outset, gathering irresistible momentum in its later stages with its well-paced, gripping plot. Lawless has made a valuable contribution to the esteemed tradition of taking up the mantle of the unspoken and overshadowed voices in medieval history and myth, and a clear path has been laid to continue telling the stories of Gormflaith and Fódla. I sincerely look forward to returning to the world of the novel in any such future instalments, which I suspect will become all the more well-wrought as their author grows in experience.