The Witch's Heart

"The Witch’s Heart is the exact kind of book I’m actively seeking at the moment—books that enrich and broaden women’s stories from both history and mythology. Books that fill in the woman-shaped gaps in our past. Book that give voices to female characters who have been sidelined and silenced in the very tales in which they appear. Incredibly, despite being half the human race, women are thought to only occupy about 0.5% of all recorded history. Addressing this is crucial, and I think authors have a huge role to play in that. “Certain fantasy fans have a misogynistic, whitewashed, straightwashed view of the past” Some books I’ve loved in this vein are A Curse of Roses by Diana Pinguicha (about Saint Isabel de Aragão), Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland), The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo by Catherine Johnson (about the titular imposter), Hild by Nicola Griffith (about Saint Hilda of Whitby) and The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (about the Vardø witch trials). In The Witch’s Heart , we get a beautiful and fleshed-out story for the jötunn Angrboða , who is briefly acknowledged as a wife of Loki and mother of his children in Norse mythology. Genevieve Gornichec both acknowledges her erasure and resolves it, giving Angrboða a life beyond her relationship with Loki, even as she explores their love story in detail. We see Angrboða as a powerful witch and seer, a devoted mother, a lover and friend, and most importantly, as a woman at the heart of her own story at last. I’m very grateful for books like this one. That’s a huge question, and the answer will obviously depend on the reader—or the writer—but for me, part of the genre’s lure lies in its possibilities. Fantasy can reflect on the past, mirror the present, muse on what the future could look like, or do away with our world altogether (in as much as that’s possible) and build a new one from scratch. Speculative fiction has no real limit but imagination."

"Yes, The Witch’s Heart is a really accomplished piece of work. In it, Genevieve Gornichec identifies quite a few of the giantess figures in Old Norse myth as a single person. This person is Angrboda, who is the mother of Loki’s children, the monstrous children: the wolf, the serpent and Hel. She is in a feud with Odin, because she has the knowledge of a particular kind of magic called seid. Odin has killed her and thrown her burnt heart out into the wasteland, but she has regenerated and is now living far away from the gods in a cave. Loki comes to find her, and she feels that Loki is the one for her. But then, for political reasons, Loki has to marry one of the goddesses, and he doesn’t come round so often. He becomes a kind of deadbeat dad, and partly because of the gods’ enmity with Loki and partly because of the threats of the prophecy, the gods come and take her children away. Angrboda also meets Skadi, whose father was a giant who has been killed by the gods. Skadi is organising a kind of resistance movement among the giants, against the gods. By the end of the novel, you’re kind of rooting for the giants to overthrow the gods and get rid of them because they are so self-seeking, so tyrannical, so lacking in any kind of moral fibre. The idea, again, of the gods being wiped out by Ragnarok and the world starting again without them is one that seems quite compelling. The world of the gods mirrors our own world in some ways, and we need to start over in a cleaner, greener, better kind of place. Every Greek mythological heroine has had her own retelling now, pretty well, but not so much the Old Norse mythology. I’ve recently read The Valkyrie by Kate Heartfield, which tells the story of Gudrun and Brynhild in a way that mixes history and mythology, and that was interesting."