By Mary Dockray-Miller
The Danish princess Hildeburh must marry Finn, King of Frisia, and produce an heir to seal the peace between their warring tribes – but she has already pledged herself to the cult of Freyja, the matriarchal goddess who shares wisdom and magic only with her solitary priestesses. An enigmatic and secondary figure in the Old English poem Beowulf, in Freyja’s Garden, Hildeburh steps forward as the heroine of her own story as she tries to wield queenly power in Frisia and appease the goddess whose service her father forced her to abandon. In fifth-century northern Europe, an era of Viking ships, named swords, and precarious existence, can Hildeburh keep the peace and keep her people alive?
Medievalist and professor Mary Dockray-Miller brings her expertise in women’s history to her first foray into fiction, re-shaping a minor section of Beowulf into a novel focused on an early medieval woman torn between her duty to her family and her own desires. Fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe and Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind will recognize the impulse to center the narrative on a woman struggling in a world dominated by men.
Subscribe to the Freyja’s Garden Project Room in the Collaboratory to read the work as it progresses and to access Dr. Dockray-Miller’s Discord thread.
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