Hild

Acknowledgements

I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time. The list of people to whom I’d like to offer acknowledgement and thanks is correspondingly long:

To my editor, Sean McDonald, and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Jonathan Galassi, Andrew Mandel, Jeff Seroy, Kathy Daneman, Spenser Lee, Devon Mazzone, Emily Bell, Taylor Sperry, Nick Courage, Charlotte Strick, Abby Kagan, and all those who have worked hard and intelligently on behalf of this book. I also want to thank Karla Eoff, my copy editor.

To my agent, Stephanie Cabot, and Anna Worrall and all at the Gernert Company. It’s a privilege working with such a team.

To the Society of Authors, in the United Kingdom, who gave me a grant for travel and research at a critical juncture.

To the medieval bloggers, academic and otherwise—Michelle of Heavenfield, Jonathan Jarret, Magistra et Mater, Tim Clarkson, Sally Wilde, Guy Halsall, Carla Naylund, Reverend Brenda Warren—who have helped me, some unwittingly but most with deliberate effort and patience. Thanks also to Lisa Spangenberg and Wendy Pearson for input on various things, and to Dennis King, and David Burke and John Clay, for fixing my Old Irish. All mistakes are, of course, my own.

To all composers, compilers, translators and enthusiasts of Old English poetry. Rædwald’s elegy here is how I imagined part of the first draft of Beowulf might have looked if it were written just before the Age of Conversion rather than a little later (as most scholars agree is most likely the case). I used a variety of translations as the basis of my linguistic retro-engineering project and then much poetic license. Again all errors are my own.

To my friends, for practical assistance, patience, encouragement, wine, and more: Angélique Corthals, Liliana Dávalos, Maria Dahvana Headley, Liz Butcher, Guillermo Castro, Ginny Gilder, Lynn Slaughter, Dorothy Allison, Val McDermid, Robert Schenkkan, Karen Joy Fowler, Matt Ruff, Karina Meléndez, Jennifer Durham, and Vicki Platts-Brown.

To my family, in the United Kingdom and the United States. Thank you.

To Steve Swartz, who appears here as Stephanus the Black because he contributed enough money to the African Well Fund to bring potable water to hundreds if not thousands of people.

To Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and Richard Mabey, for their wonderful books about Britain and its wild and wooded ways. And to Thomas H. Nelson, author of The Birds of Yorkshire, published in 1907 and long out of print, for writing about the miracle of doves and starlings in the same nest.

To my community of readers, everywhere, for following me to strange places (sometimes literally).

To the U.K. rugby fans of my youth who introduced me to several scabrous ditties. The song here is based on one of them. Some of you will know the tune…

To the experts who (mostly) have never heard of me but who nevertheless helped in ways that one day I hope to pay forward: Sarah Foot, Nicholas Higham, Robin Fleming, Chris Wickham, Barbara Yorke, Richard Underwood, Alex Woolf, D. P. Kirby, Edward James, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Alaric Hall, Rosamond McKitterick, Sally Crawford, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing, Penelope Walton Rogers, John Blair, Peter Hunter Blair, every contributor to The Heroic Age, and, naturally, the two who got me started, Trevelyan and Stenton.

To Hild herself, of course, for changing the world, which is what it takes, sometimes, for me to pay attention.

And finally, above all, to Kelley, always Kelley, for not, ever, letting me do less than my best. After all these years, I still want to impress her.