eccentric_hat

Happy new year, friends!

For Yuletide this year I wrote this story:

Hrimforst (4087 words) by Eccentric_Hat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Exeter Book
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Wanderer (The Wanderer), Wife (The Wife's Lament)
Summary: On a cold night, at a small house, in an oak grove, two people meet who are far from home.

You don't really need to know the canon to read this. It's based on poems that are somewhat vague about their circumstances, so I made up and filled in the backstory within the narrative. Just assume we're in England sometime between, say, 900 and 1050 CE, and if you're interested, the poems are linked in the endnotes.

I am proud of these aspects of this story:

It is narrated by a woman, finally! All the other fic I've written, and most of it that I've podficced, has been about pairs of dudes: Holmes & Watson, Jeeves & Wooster, Strange & Norrell, Cecil & Carlos. I've started fanfic about women before but never finished and posted it. In some cases I have personal reasons for finding those stories harder to write (when I really identify with a character I find it exceedingly difficult to finish and publish a story about her); but with or without those ~~excuses~~ reasons, I always want to see more stories about women in the world. So I'm happy to have spent some time with this feminine cry of grief/anger/resentment/love/??? from a thousand years ago.

Nobody in the fic stares at someone else's face and realizes something important about their feelings! This has its place, and I'm not going to feel bad about having Sherlock Holmes do it, but it is a device I sometimes lean on too much.

I spent some time with the language, replacing French/Latin words with Anglo-Saxon or Germanic ones where I could. This was actually a lot harder for me than the Susanna Clarke pastiche I did last year. There were plenty of places where I couldn't really find a suitable equivalent for the word I wanted ("regret" is a big one), but I made a bunch of these replacements once I got the hang of it: "unnecessarily" with "needlessly," "stranger" with "unbidden guest," and so on. Just yesterday I found out about The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which takes this conceit much, much farther than I even tried to do. I'm interested in reading that, and in doing more thinking about language in this way. Usually I use lots of Latinate vocabulary and lots of abstraction, and I like the tone I came up with when I challenged that tendency.

Parts of the story don't actually make a ton of sense if you look at it too closely, but I'm mostly blaming that on the source material. If I were writing a story from scratch about a displaced or exiled wife, I would probably have had her return to her family of origin, not go live alone in a sacred oak grove. But I do respect that thousand-year-old cry (more than I respect the Wanderer, apparently, since I stripped him of half his honor in writing this version of him) and so I stayed in the oak grove and I'm pleased with the result.

Also, my gift was written by

fifteendozentimes and beta'd by

caminante, whose main gift was ALSO written by

fifteendozentimes, so good work to everyone who succeeded in not spilling those beans! I'm very impressed.