The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth
Jan. 27th, 2026 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealIn 2008 I was living in Minnesota (but not quite old enough to vote). There was a referendum on the ballot about arts and water funding. And it was like...I'm in favor of funding these things, but why does everyone have to vote on it, shouldn't the legislature be passing a budget to do that? Isn't that their job? (California: hold my beer.) Anyway it passed, and the copyright page is like "thanks to the voters of Minnesota."
This book is about the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, written in a pastiche of pre-1066 Old English dialect. Some of the words were completely unfamiliar and have to be picked up from context: "fyrd"="conscript army," "scucca"="demon." Many others, you can sound it out, or if you're an etymology nerd it helps. (The "wer" in "wergild" is the same as in "werewolf," it means "male person"; the "man" in "wifman" is gender-neutral.) But, like, Kingsnorth wants people who haven't read "Sir Gawain" to be able to read this. At the potential risk of humblebragging it wasn't that bad.
Kingsnorth is an interesting figure, in that he has dived deep into various political and religious ideologies (he's currently an Orthodox Christian, but I don't think he was one when this was written). I've read some of his essays (nothing book-length) and there's a very fine line between, on the one hand, "Christianity is at its best when it's speaking truth to power, we began as a bunch of fishermen and hippies. When the faith gets co-opted by government or national power, it's inevitably co-opted, so everything has been going downhill basically from the time of Constantine. If our society is becoming less of a 'Christian nation', good riddance! We should not want the church tangled up with secular power, let's be fishermen and hippies again, please." On the other hand, "back in the day, we had a shared culture and a shared source of meaning, and that was great. Now everything is fragmented and technology is ruling everything, and that's terrible. We need to disconnect from the machines and get back to the land and tradition and faith." Kind of a difficult tightrope to walk.
This book was written in 2013. The narrator, Buccmaster, shares some of the nostalgic "the good old ways were better, I don't like these foreigners and their newfangled religion and authority" ideas. (Pre-Brexit tensions?) But he's also a completely unsympathetic person. The more you read, the worse he sounds. Obviously Kingsnorth is trying to depict a character whose ethical system and worldview is completely different from hours, and showing how cycles of abuse perpetuate, but by the end it's kind of like "let's just take the opposite of whatever he says and go for it." Definitely the more fatalistic side of "the old system has been destroyed and there's no hope for bringing it back, so we just have to deal."
It makes an interesting counterpart to a couple other books from similar eras:
The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England--Anglo-Saxons who love skops and avoid the crazy Waelisc. This one is set (the equivalent of) couple centuries earlier, and monotheism is still very new; the Anglo-Saxons worship the Norse pantheon, but Woden is a god of fear rather than love, and you can see why the new religion might be more enjoyable.
Kristin Lavransdatter--historical fiction rather than fantasy. You get the sense that we as readers aren't supposed to believe there are elves lurking behind the scenes, but the characters take that for granted, it's part of their worldview. And sometimes you do witchcraft on the sly, even if the Christian authorities frown upon it.
"The Wake" also uses the literary fiction conceit of developing Buccmaster's characterization through flashbacks to his relationship with his grandfather and his sister, to the point that when the end of that subplot is revealed, it doesn't really change the actual plot in any way, just confirms what you should think of him as an unreliable narrator/person.
Every time Buccmaster mentions that he used to be "a socman of three oxgangs," take a shot.
This book is about the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, written in a pastiche of pre-1066 Old English dialect. Some of the words were completely unfamiliar and have to be picked up from context: "fyrd"="conscript army," "scucca"="demon." Many others, you can sound it out, or if you're an etymology nerd it helps. (The "wer" in "wergild" is the same as in "werewolf," it means "male person"; the "man" in "wifman" is gender-neutral.) But, like, Kingsnorth wants people who haven't read "Sir Gawain" to be able to read this. At the potential risk of humblebragging it wasn't that bad.
Kingsnorth is an interesting figure, in that he has dived deep into various political and religious ideologies (he's currently an Orthodox Christian, but I don't think he was one when this was written). I've read some of his essays (nothing book-length) and there's a very fine line between, on the one hand, "Christianity is at its best when it's speaking truth to power, we began as a bunch of fishermen and hippies. When the faith gets co-opted by government or national power, it's inevitably co-opted, so everything has been going downhill basically from the time of Constantine. If our society is becoming less of a 'Christian nation', good riddance! We should not want the church tangled up with secular power, let's be fishermen and hippies again, please." On the other hand, "back in the day, we had a shared culture and a shared source of meaning, and that was great. Now everything is fragmented and technology is ruling everything, and that's terrible. We need to disconnect from the machines and get back to the land and tradition and faith." Kind of a difficult tightrope to walk.
This book was written in 2013. The narrator, Buccmaster, shares some of the nostalgic "the good old ways were better, I don't like these foreigners and their newfangled religion and authority" ideas. (Pre-Brexit tensions?) But he's also a completely unsympathetic person. The more you read, the worse he sounds. Obviously Kingsnorth is trying to depict a character whose ethical system and worldview is completely different from hours, and showing how cycles of abuse perpetuate, but by the end it's kind of like "let's just take the opposite of whatever he says and go for it." Definitely the more fatalistic side of "the old system has been destroyed and there's no hope for bringing it back, so we just have to deal."
It makes an interesting counterpart to a couple other books from similar eras:
The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England--Anglo-Saxons who love skops and avoid the crazy Waelisc. This one is set (the equivalent of) couple centuries earlier, and monotheism is still very new; the Anglo-Saxons worship the Norse pantheon, but Woden is a god of fear rather than love, and you can see why the new religion might be more enjoyable.
Kristin Lavransdatter--historical fiction rather than fantasy. You get the sense that we as readers aren't supposed to believe there are elves lurking behind the scenes, but the characters take that for granted, it's part of their worldview. And sometimes you do witchcraft on the sly, even if the Christian authorities frown upon it.
"The Wake" also uses the literary fiction conceit of developing Buccmaster's characterization through flashbacks to his relationship with his grandfather and his sister, to the point that when the end of that subplot is revealed, it doesn't really change the actual plot in any way, just confirms what you should think of him as an unreliable narrator/person.
Every time Buccmaster mentions that he used to be "a socman of three oxgangs," take a shot.
1060s :handshake meme: 2010s
the folcs needs to waecnan
