Echoes of the past resonate across the centuries as Dr Anna Petersen, a medievalist and runologist, is struggling with past trauma and allowing herself to trust again. When archaeologist (and Anna's old adversary) Professor Matt Beacham unearths a 6th century seax with a mysterious runic inscription, and reluctantly approaches Anna for help, a chain of events brings the past firmly back into her present. And why does the burial site also contain two sets of bones, one 6th century and the other modern?
As the past and present intermingle alarmingly, Anna and Matt need to work together to solve the mystery of the seax runes and the seemingly impossible burial, and to discover the truth about the past. Tensions rise and sparks fly between Anna and Matt. But how is 6th century Lady Mildryth of Mercia connected to Anna? Can they both be the Daughter of Mercia?
For fans of Barbara Erskine, Elena Collins, Pamela Hartshorne, Susanna Kearsley and Christina Courtenay.
Daughter of Mercia is a timeslip/dual time novel in which the main character in the present-day timeline, Dr Anna Petersen, is a university academic, which is inspired by my own profession. The historical timeline, that of the 6th century Lady Mildryth, has been the greatest inspiration for my last four novels, including Daughter of Mercia (and its subsequent WIP series), namely the Anglo-Saxon world. I studied it for my first degree many years ago when Professor Barbara Raw was the lead academic at my university. Sadly, she is now no longer with us but I owe her a great debt of gratitude. She taught us Anglo-Saxon (Old English) as if it were a current language, in the modern languages lab! Those of us in the OE group used to go around campus talking to each other in Anglo-Saxon; I’m sure the other students must have wondered what country we were from. Little did they know it was from the 5th/6th/7th centuries, and beyond, to the Norman Conquest! She also taught us Anglo-Saxon history and, perhaps most importantly to me, domestic history and literature, far from the old view of a dangerous, dark and barbaric world of battle and bloodshed.
I have been intrigued ever since, to learn about domestic history of those times, how people used to live, and archaeology, my next inspiration, has revealed so much more to me, especially in more recent times. There have been some extremely enlightening finds from excavations in the past few years. We have little in the way of written evidence from the Anglo-Saxons, certainly as far as the early years of the era are concerned. But we have the evidence of found artefacts and we now know that it was a much richer and more cultured period than previously thought. I wanted to show this in Daughter of Mercia.
After all, the period we used to call ‘the Dark Ages’ was only ‘dark’ because we didn’t know very much about it. The lack of written or archaeological evidence previously hampered our understanding. Now archaeologists, with their more sophisticated tools, can find traces and images on artefacts which provide us with a clearer picture of the life and times of the folk who lived a millennium and a half ago in our land.
We discovered that life was much more ‘advanced’ than had previously been supposed. There is now a growing body of archaeological, geophysical and isotopic evidence to indicate how the people of the 5th and 6th centuries lived: feasting halls, jewellery, imported luxury goods. Silver coin, bronze and silver rings, amethyst beads, gold rings, jewel-encrusted brooches, bracteates (neck pendants), gold torcs (neck rings) and so much more, have been excavated. Recent digs have uncovered evidence of large feasting halls (mead halls) as a focal point of the settlements, and the place where the Witan (decision-making council) was held. Osteo-archaeological analyses of human bones found in the cemeteries attached to these villages have confirmed the diet as more varied than previously thought, with some foods even imported from distant lands for the wealthy.
Literary evidence from the 7th or 8th century heroic poem Beowulf (the dating isn’t clear) indicates the riches of the hall and its decoration: ‘tapestries worked in gold glittered on the walls’, ‘eofor-līc scionon ofer hlēor-bergan: gehroden golde’ (‘boar-crests glittered above the helmets adorned with gold’), ‘māđm-æht’ (‘precious treasures’), ‘bēag-gyfa’ (the treasure-giver, or lord/leader/chieftain/king). The feasting and drinking are emphasised in the poem and many Anglo-Saxon words emphasise the importance of mead: ‘medo-ful’ (the mead cup), ‘medo-benc’ (the mead benc), ‘medu-drēam’ (revelry in mead-drinking and feasting).
There would be entertainment during the meal: a scōp would be employed, the poet/musician who entertained with ‘harp and voice’ (not a harp as we know it), and the poetry and story-telling would celebrate both traditional Christian and pagan heroic deeds and values. These narrative poems would honour and glorify the community and unify the society. All this inspired my descriptions in Daughter of Mercia.
I’m also inspired by the notion of ‘what if’. What if there was much more mingling of Romano-British society than previously thought, through inter-marriage with Romans who remained after the Roman troop withdrawals, and a similar intermingling between Britons and the immigrant Angles and Saxons. What if there was a much more gradual change and evolution in post-Roman Britain and throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, with immigration and settlement, rather than sudden brutal change from invasion and suppression by Anglo-Saxon marauders. What if domestic life was much more ordered and settled. It’s the view of more recent historians and archaeologists in view of new findings, and one advocated by (among others) Professor Susan Oosthuizen (The Emergence of the English 2019).
I guess the final (and the basic spring-board) ‘What if’ inspiration for my novel is the intriguing concept of time. I find it fascinating. My own career as a university academic inspired the setting of Daughter of Mercia and the work of Dr Anna Petersen, but I wanted her to be able to somehow get closer to life in the times she researched as an academic, and to her counterpart in the 6th century, Lady Mildryth. My research into timeslip and dual time links was so exciting for me. I looked again at the scientific theories of quantum mechanics, which, I admit, sounds a bit weird: the Einstein-Rosen Bridge theory, and that of ‘worm-holes’. These are all basically ideas about space-time portals through which you could slip from one layer of the universe into another, or from one historic period into another. I started thinking more deeply about this idea when I experienced some odd events of déja vu: that weird feeling that I’d already experienced something that I thought was actually happening for the first time. It inspired me to start to write stories about this, and especially in Daughter of Mercia, the possibility that someone could even get trapped in a different time.
If you want to read more about this period of history, I have a series (Living with the Anglo Saxons) on my blog at https://juliaibbotsonauthor.com.
Julia Ibbotson is fascinated by the medieval world and the concept of time. She is the author of historical mysteries with a frisson of romance. Her books are evocative of time and place, well-researched and uplifting page-turners. Her current series focuses on early medieval time-slip/dual-time mysteries.
Julia read English at Keele University, England, specialising in medieval language / literature / history, and has a PhD in socio-linguistics. After a turbulent time in Ghana, West Africa, she became a school teacher, then a university academic and researcher. Her break as an author came soon after she joined the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme in 2015, with a three-book deal from Lume Books for a trilogy (Drumbeats) set in Ghana in the 1960s.
She has published five other books, including A Shape on the Air, an Anglo-Saxon timeslip mystery, and its two sequels The Dragon Tree and The Rune Stone. Her latest novel is the first of a new series of Anglo-Saxon dual-time mysteries, Daughter of Mercia, where echoes of the past resonate across the centuries.
Her books will appeal to fans of Barbara Erskine, Pamela Hartshorne, Susanna Kearsley, and Christina Courtenay. Her readers say: ‘Julia’s books captured my imagination’, ‘beautiful story-telling’, ‘evocative and well-paced storylines’, ‘brilliant and fascinating’ and ‘I just couldn’t put it down’.
