REENACTMENT AND WRITING BY GENEVIEVE GORNICHEC

12/5/2021

The Ginger Nuts of Horror Website welcomes author Genevieve Gornichec to the sie to celebrate the release of her new novel, The Witch’s Heart, published this month by Titan Books.

REENACTMENT AND WRITING BY GENEVIEVE GORNICHEC

Getting to visit the world of your absolute favorite fantasy novel would be a dream come true for a lot of us, no matter how scary or dangerous that world may be. I think that’s part of the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons, and medieval and renaissance faires—that idea of stepping away from the humdrum of our everyday lives and into another world, just for a time.

Historical reenactment may not be fantasy in the genre sense, but takes that immersion to an entirely different level. For me, doing Viking Age living history has been an invaluable experience when it came to revising my debut historical fantasy novel, The Witch’s Heart. Because, realistically—how often can a fantasy author say that they’ve walked in their main character’s shoes?

When I wrote the first draft of The Witch’s Heart ten years ago, I was in my third year at university. I’d become obsessed with the Norse myths and Icelandic sagas, and the book was a reflection of this. At this stage, I was so focused on moving the story along and making it fit into the background of the myths that I didn’t think too much about the setting.

But several years after I wrote The Witch’s Heart, I went to my local renaissance faire in a “lady Viking” outfit I’d bought off the Internet and found out that there was a Viking Age living history group near me. This group and its members changed the course of my life as surely as the first time I’d set foot in my professor’s Old Norse classroom as an undergraduate.

For reference, the Viking Age spans roughly from the years 700 CE to 1100 CE (most commonly, the raiding of Lindisfarne Monastery in 793 CE to the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 CE), so taking such a far step back in time was really intimidating at first. How was I supposed to even imagine how people lived back then?

Immersion is easier than you think when you’re surrounded by a group of people committed to exploring what life might have been like so many centuries ago, which is really what’s at the heart of living history itself. Simple things like cooking over a campfire, building tents, making crafts, using historically plausible drinking vessels and cookware, telling tales around the hearth in a reconstructed longhouse, and watching combat techniques over the years has provided me with a perspective I never would’ve gotten anywhere else.

It made me think about my main characters: “How could Angrboda have transported her potions in the book? What types of things would Skadi have traded? What would their clothes have been made of?” These are things I had not even considered when I wrote the first draft of the book—although in my defense, I wrote it in three weeks for NaNoWriMo in 2011!

In later revisions and into the final print version, I got to pepper in little historical details, like nalbinding (which is a lot like knitting), mentions of women’s textile work, and more. Angrboda’s original outfit was even rewritten to exclude the traditional brooches that Viking Age women wore, since I found them too cumbersome to work in, and the witch is nothing if not practical.

These types of experiences enabled me to make the setting that much richer in The Witch’s Heart, and there’s something really cathartic about escaping into another world, whether you’re reading a book or camping out at a Viking fort without electricity or cell phone service. If you pick up the book, I hope you enjoy it—and thank you very much to Ginger Nuts of Horror for hosting me today!

The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

When a banished witch falls in love with the legendary trickster Loki, she risks the wrath of the gods in this fierce, subversive debut novel that reimagines Norse myth.

Angrboda's story begins where most witch tales end: with being burnt. A punishment from Odin for sharing her visions of the future with the wrong people, the fire leaves Angrboda injured and powerless, and she flees into the furthest reaches of a remote forest. There she is found by a man who reveals himself to be the trickster god Loki, and her initial distrust of him and any of his kind grows reluctantly into a deep and abiding love.

Their union produces the most important things in her long life: a trio of peculiar children, each with a secret destiny, whom she is keen to raise at the edge of the world, safely hidden from Odin's all-seeing eye. But as Angrboda slowly recovers her prophetic powers, she learns that her blissful life and possibly all of existence is in danger.

Angrboda must choose whether she'll accept the fate that she's foreseen for her beloved family or rise to remake it.

Genevieve Gornichec earned her degree in history from The Ohio State University, but she got as close to majoring in Vikings as she possibly could, and her study of the Norse myths and Icelandic sagas became her writing inspiration. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio. The Witch’s Heart is her debut novel.