Shadows of the Past: Hearth Not Home

 Part eight of my novella, Hearth Not Home is now up on Wattpad. It finds Elna in a reflective mood after the raid on the besiegers' camp. 

Shadows of the Past: Hearth Not Home

This part of the story was added at a later stage and it gave me a chance to do a touch of world building around the faiths present in Torvenland. I was very conscious that the official religion, the Church of the Five was male dominated and patriarchal and that made me feel uncomfortable. I know that in real life, more women than men are believers even in religions which don't give them any grace for being female (the Madonna/whore issue is proof of that, as is the idea of Eve committing the first sin). I was also conscious that - even though I haven't introduced the identities of the Five gods - there wasn't a deity allied to the domain of death or luck and that didn't seem right. Death is a fundamental part of life, after all, and you don't just dismiss it as nothing because you want to ignore it. If that were the case, the West would have stopped having anything but the most cursory funeral after World War One. 

I'd wanted to have some friction, no matter how deep down, between the faith of the Five and the Torvenlanders original ways. The Torvenlanders are meant to have a Norse or Germanic influence, and let's face it there are parts of the Norse Gods' faith that aren't exactly cuddly. I'm also very conscious of how older faith structures go underground rather than being wiped out when a new religion becomes popular. That's even or perhaps especially true when we think about death gods or superstitions - these things never spring into existence completely finished and almost always have elements of historical attempts at suppression attached (for example, the fear of black cats US and UK culture is rooted in fears that cats are in league with Satan - while any cat owner can tell you they're actually in league with their stomachs and warm sunny places). 

So, I created the "Crone", a figure who draws on the idea of women out surviving men into old age and being the people who bury the dead, but also the people who weave cloth (drawing on the idea of luck and fate being something woven), and then just adding luck because it felt like it's part of the same neighbourhood. She's probably the local dream god too. In a world where only male power and authority is really acknowledged, because even though I want the Crown and Crow stories to be fantasy and Medieval Scandinavia retained many of the more egalitarian features it had during the Viking period, she's actual female power. Ingvild was born (her name by the way was taken from Behind the Name which is where I get most of the names I use in my fiction). I picture her as being a multifaceted deity, with elements of a benevolent and wise grandmother, but also of figures like Baba Yaga and Black Annis. I hesitate to use the words "hag with iron teeth" but that's definitely in there. 

The rune image was taken from Unsplash and was taken by Petr Sidorov.