Nicola Griffith on 'The Blue Sword'

04/30/21 • 3 min

A girl, a horse, and a magical sword save a kingdom in Robin McKinley's young adult classic, "The Blue Sword" — a book beloved by women of all ages. "Hild" author Nikola Griffith explains why.

My name's Nicola Griffith. I am the author most recently of a novel called “Hild.” I'd like to recommend a book. If you haven't read it, then please pick up “The Blue Sword” by Robin McKinley. It is ostensibly for teenagers, but I think I was probably about 25 or so when I read it. And I have re-read it many times since, and it holds up. It's a wonderful first-person story about a woman called Angharad, but she calls herself Harry, and by the end of the book is known as Harry, Harimad-sol. She moves from a place called Home. Sometimes I think of it as an English place, and sometimes I think of it as American Northeast, but it's very stuffy. It has lots of etiquette rules. Basically, the Wild West or the Indian frontier.

When I first read it, I was thinking in terms of the Raj, I was very English. I am very English. But now that I've lived in this country for a bit, I can see the parallels with settlers who moved out to the Western frontier. Anyway, there's lots of magic. There are swords and horses. It's sword and pony fiction with magic. I love it. It's a great book. I've just started reading it aloud. I just read the first three pages, which is why it's on my mind. And McKinley does this amazing job of taking us in to this teenager's head, her essential loneliness, her longing for a place to belong. And she does that really, really well. And then further on in the book, there are these wonderful scenes where Harry learns that she has this power. She can do prophecy. She can fight. She can control her horse. Essentially, she could beat everybody, except, of course, the king who she ends up marrying.

Sorry for the spoiler. So it's romantical, but it doesn't follow some of the really tired tropes of old fashioned romance in the sense that the woman has to look at the floor and flirt. She's basically very angry with this man in the nicest possible way. And he's reluctant to use her in the way that his powers dictate that she be employed to help him in his goal, which is to keep everyone safe because of her magic. The Blue Sword is the novel about a young woman becoming herself. It's about a woman finding her place in the world. She is a woman, but she could just as well be a man. It's about a person learning to belong, about a person finding their feet. And that is a story for any age, for any era.

—This author recommends—

The Blue Sword (Newbery Honor Roll)

—More from this author—

Interview: Nicola Griffith on Lesbian Crime Writing—Interview: Meet a Medieval Warrior-Girl: Nicola Griffith's "Hild"

A girl, a horse, and a magical sword save a kingdom in Robin McKinley's young adult classic, "The Blue Sword" — a book beloved by women of all ages. "Hild" author Nikola Griffith explains why.

—This author recommends—

The Blue Sword (Newbery Honor Roll)

—More from this author—

Interview: Nicola Griffith on Lesbian Crime Writing—Interview: Meet a Medieval Warrior-Girl: Nicola Griffith's "Hild"

Previous Episode

Helen Macdonald On 'The Dark Is Rising'

Every year, at holiday time, Macdonald reads this tale of a boy who finds out he's one of the "old ones," part of a series from author Susan Cooper. She says it reconnects her with a sense of wonder inspired by what might lurk beneath the surface of the seen world.

My name's Helen Macdonald — I'm the author of "H Is For Hawk" — and I want to recommend a 1973 children's book called "The Dark Is Rising" by the author Susan Cooper.
This funny thing happens in England every year: a whole bunch of friends of mine — on the winter solstice — we all read this book. It's a book about magic. Anyone who's read Harry Potter will know that there is a long history of books about small boys, when they're about 10 or 11, realizing that they're not normal, that they have magical powers. And this is one of the early books in that kind of tradition. It's about a small boy called Will who wakes up on his eleventh birthday to discover that he is, in fact, one of the "old ones." And his job is to protect the world against the forces of darkness.
This all sounds very, very clichéd but my goodness, I cannot recommend this book more highly. It's one of the most beautifully written fantasy books I've ever come across.
It made the English landscape sing for me as a child. It's full of snowy woods. It's full of Arthurian legend. It's full of Anglo-Saxon myths. It's full of everyday life. There are the most astonishing sequences which brim with eerie power of the small boy who has the power to light fires out of dead wood he sees lying on paths, and the panic as he realizes that — for some reason — he cannot put them out.
When you're small, you're prey to fear, you're prey to panics in a way that I think disappear as you get older. Whenever I read this book, those old panics about our place in the world and the limits of our powers come back bright as ever.
It's also a very poignant book. There are characters in here who suffer. There are characters who are caught out of time. And the whole thing is also about how we see the past in the landscape. This has been very influential for me — when you look at the landscape wherever you are in the world, it's very fascinating to try and imagine who stood there before you. And this book plays with that sense and plays with the stories we've told about the places we live.
Also it's got the kind of really cool things that you find in fantasy books, you know: Will has to collect a series of very important things of power — again, very Potter-like — and the whole book itself is part of a much wider series that deals with this great fight between the dark and the light. You know you can't mess around with that, as a topic.
So I really recommend you go out and buy this book and I really hope you'll love it as much as I do.

—This author recommends—

The Dark is Rising (The Dark is Rising Sequence)

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Interview: Helen Macdonald Battles Grief with a Goshawk—Interview: Helen Macdonald and "Birdle" the Parrot

Next Episode

Ada Calhoun on 'Street Through Time'

There’s a book that Ada Calhoun, author of “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis“ thinks of as both one of her favorites to read out loud with her son, as well as one that has inspired her own writing. It’s “A Street Through Time: The 12,000 Year Journey Along the Same Street,” Illustrated by Steve Noon and written by Anne Millard. The book is the story of one street, leading the reader through historical events and the passage of time, with the street itself starring as the main character.

My name is Ada Calhoun and I'm the author of "Why We Can't Sleep Women's New Midlife Crisis."

When I was the mother of a young child, I was reading this book to him and it was called "A Street Through Time: The 12,000 Year Journey Along the Same Street," Illustrated by Steve Noon and written by Dr. Anne Millard.

The great thing about it, it's mostly pictures of the same street and every time you turn the page it's hundreds of years later. So the houses go up and there's an invasion. The houses come down and then they come back up again and then they get bigger.

What I love about this book is, first of all, it gives you this amazing history lesson, because you see how world civilization has evolved over thousands of years. And then also it just gives you the sense of perspective about how small we are and how different things have been just not that long ago.

And I love it that you'll see somebody will drop his sword in a battle and then another, 200 years later, someone will fish out the sword while they're out in their rowboat. And it inspired me a lot when I started working on a book about the history of my street, St. Mark's Place in the East Village, that's where I grew up, called St. Mark's is Dead: the Many Lives of America's Hippest Street. And I feel like I was really influenced by that way of looking at history. As you look at this, this one piece of land, and it's a stage and people come onto the stage and they have a fight or they have a conversation and then some people leave the stage and other people come on the stage.

And so, thinking of the street as a stage where things change, but it's like a fixed place, was really, really helpful to me and I think it inspired me to do the book the way I did it. Then that book did pretty well. And then I was able to do another book and then I was able to do this book. So I kind of, I traced my whole career back to reading that children's book to my son many years ago.

I like it because, yeah, we sort of think of that as anti-career time. In ways sometimes I think, okay, I'm not going to work right now. I'm going to focus on my child. Or I'm going to have to step away from my child and go do my work. But I think a lot of the best things with both are when they come together. And I think about now, reading that book to my son was really creative for me. It was really inspirational. And it, I feel like led basically my whole writing career in some ways.

—This author recommends—

A Street Through Time: A 12,000 Year Journey Along the Same Street

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Interview: The Things That Keep Gen X Women Up At Night