... Telling Me Something?

Sometimes, it's hard not to think Janet Reid, with her familiarity with her own community of writers (not clients), is trying to tell us something personal ... Such is both the ego and the insecurity of a fretful writer Woodland Creature.

In this week's week-in-review post, she quoted me ...


DLM said
But there seems really to be no "middle class" in traditional publishing now. You can't be *dependable*: you have to be a breakout, and - never mind the pressure, it's just a matter of numbers, and the numbers dictate, we simply cannot all be The Next Big Thing.

JANET said
We call it mid-list but you're right. It's like the Army; you can't spend five years in the same rank or your career is pretty much over. Get promoted or get out. Like baseball: you can play on the farm teams for a while, but either move up, or hang up your glove.

Publishing is not the only place this up or out pattern applies.  But it only applies to COMMERCIAL publishing.  You can publish and sell your own work forever. That's one of the many great things about the electronic marketplace: it's easy to access and it actually works. I'm not saying it's easy to self-publish (well, it is, but let's assume I mean self-publishing well here) but that the barriers to buyers are much diminished from where they were 20 years ago.


I think she's seen enough of my comments at her own blog contemplating commercial (what I've been calling traditional, which she rightly calls commercial - augh, and now to fix my tags ...) publishing versus self-pub, and certainly she knows my writing, for my interpretation that she's Telling Me Something - or, at least, agreeing with my self-evaluation - not to be completely out of hand.

And even if it is, at the end of the day, she's neither my agent nor my ultimate guide; just a kind reader - and a professional - along the way I am taking.

So whether she meant "anything" or not ... the upshot is the same. I don't know that I want to hold out for the big leagues. I sure know I don't want to be in the military ...

And, really, right now, what I OUGHT to be worrying about is the WIP.

Queen Saint Clotilde's Life

I have not neglected to post about Clotilde, but I have failed in one thing, and that is to point out that she was in her time a VERY long-lived lady indeed.

In The Ax and the Vase, I placed her marriage to Clovis I at about age nineteen in 493 CE.  She was married to him until his death in 511, and so they had a little less than twenty years.

Given that Clotilde lived about SEVENTY years, it’s difficult to put her marriage into perspective.  All of the history touching on her centers upon the marriage, and even the tales of her life as a supposed bloodthirsty revenge-machine after his death, inciting war over decades-old other imaginary murders, tend to be brief in comparison with the hagiography of the saint who brought a king to Catholic Christianity.

The history of Christendom focuses heavily on Clovis I, First Catholic King in Europe – and, to be sure, I have myself framed The Ax and the Vase as exactly that story.  Clotilde’s role is venerated, and she earned her entire fame in history by being the importuning wife who brought a king to the Church – yet she herself is rarely examined except through the lens of her husband, her sons.  We have no tales of her alone, outside the context of the marriage and her children.  And that’s not the exclusive case of Frankish women in history.

Clotilde is, if we take what sources we have at historical value (we shouldn’t), the catalyst, the instigator.  It’s clear her personality was strong – and yet, the person passed down through the centuries is never her own.  Always the daughter, the wife, the mother, Clotilde is in some ways obscured by the very act which brought her the greatest power and the enduring fame of fifteen hundred years’ sanctification.

If Clovis was the first Catholic king in Europe, the mighty precedent of a faith and tradition which set the very course of western history itself after Rome’s “fall” …

Clotilde is the woman, the heart, the impetus, the persuader – who made it happen.

Clovis tends generally to be cast either as a Christian of the Arian faith – or, more often, as an outright pagan.  Historians and enthusiasts squabble enjoyably about “what kind” of pagan he was, but there is no question, his coming to Catholicism was both unexpectedly nonconformist in his day, and an epochal event in Gaul and, eventually, beyond.

If it had not been for the will of his wife, it’s quite possible Clovis never would have come to the Church.

Now, think about that.  Really consider – the course of European life for a thousand years, until the Reformation, the rebellion against that church, the extent and influence of the Catholic Church in most people’s lives and expectations, for so many centuries.  Think about the complexion of the world if he had been and remained a non-trinitarian Christian.  If he had never converted, and the Church grew, but never quite integrated with the royal houses of Europe as it was able to partially thanks to Clovis’ precedent.  The feudal world would have looked very different – the material world would have, without cathedrals and basilicas coming to represent and to attract the wealth and trade of cities.  Consider the increasingly-bound ties, through generations and centruies, of throne and mitre, of money and influence – and the very morality and way of life of such a vast swath of time and humanity.

Imagine that one of the fundamental precedents that set THIS world in motion, never occurred.  That Clovis never looked critically at the Roman Church – spiritual scion of the Roman empire he had assisted to *extinguish* in Gaul – that he remained Arian, or pagan, or perhaps that he did convert, but was never so powerful a monarch as he was to become.  Imagine a Catholic king surrounded by Arians and pagans, who succumbed to defeat at their hands, or who stayed at three small cities in Belgium, and was no tool for a growing Church to gain greater influence and power – and followers.

Because the followers – that is perhaps the greatest key to Clovis’ conversion and baptism, and their eventual effects and influence.

Clovis came to power by the CHARISMA of his blood.  And the stories of the thousands who followed him in ecstasies to the Catholic faith are consistent, whatever else we may say of the veracity or dependability of sources for Late Antiquity.  So are the tales of new converts who lashed out against Arians and pagans in the wake of the fervor accompanying the massive acceptance of Catholicism.

It is Clotilde, a woman Clovis may in part have chosen to marry precisely because of her religious connections, who brought him from friendly correspondence with bishops, to actual submission to her faith.

It is Clotilde, who lived seventy years – nearly three decades after the death of her king – whose influence on one man rendered so many more susceptible to conversion, to baptism, to the Church she had in fact importuned upon him for many years before he accepted.

Clotilde baptized their first son against the will of Clovis – and that son died.

Clovis resisted her testimony, her witnessing, for years – until, on the field of battle, he finally is said to have laid himself in HER G-d’s hands, and gained victory.  Became the king he did become.  And forged his relationship with her Church.



The thirty years after Clovis’ death seeem almost to bear no relationship to the foregoing tales of her conviction, her purity in faith.  The character left to history devolves to a vicious queen out to right ancient family wrongs, in revenge for her father’s (purported) murder – bringing Burgundy to war, and setting her sons to acts of bitterness and revenge which seem not only out of character with the story of Clovis’ life, but out of character with her own youth and queenship.

It is puzzling, in any research (or just causal reading) of a period, to come across a character so lionized and so demonized all at once, yet it is hardly uncommon.  Just as the saint and queen, depicted in her youth and matronhood as the highest ideal may become a crone obsessed with long-gone wrongs … a young woman of power and hope may become a poisoner, the tool of a story meant to illustrate sin and the worst in her gender.  For that matter, even the young warrior may become, over years of propaganda and lost human motivation, the scapegoat vilified for liking little boys, dissipated in wine and shame for a new king to conquer and damn him.  Ahem.

Over the years and years I have spent reading about all the figures of the time, I’ve found reason to doubt almost all the worst tales told.  Propaganda plays an enormous role in The Ax and the Vase, and anyone who reads it should keep in mind both that and the fact that the novel is told in first-person.  I consciously set Clovis up as a somewhat unreliable (and, in that bargain – *incomplete*) narrator, just as I make explicit every piece of propaganda he set forth – the making of his own legend.

The result ends up being that, though I feel her character has blood in her veins and flesh on her bones, Clotilde is done little more justice as a figure in history itself than she is most anywhere else.

None of us lives our lives with great attention paid to our posterity.  Those few who do often rotate around an axis of vanity; and personal forms of propaganda, at that – the well-chosen selfie, the stories told or posted subjectively.  Whether self-aware or not, we’re all writing our own life’s stories, and to author our lives with consideration far beyond how we look in the immediate is close to unheard-of.  So I couldn’t really write a novel in first-person, by a husband often frustrated by his queen – by a *man*, who could not see the woman in his bed as a saint nor a part of history – and DO her that justice.

I hope my readers do her a little better, and see beyond the constraints of creative narrative.

I know some, surely, see beyond the saint and the bitter dowager.  And see a remarkable woman, long-lived, and more than the sum of her husband, and her children.

Look Again: at Jane Seymour

In the strange proportions of the marriages of Henry VIII (Aragon's duration being by far the longest, though in the telling she tends to be dismissed in a hurry in order to get to the blood and sex; and then three wives in quick succession during his final seven years), Jane Seymour's less then two year reign beside the king is often simplified as the quiet after the storm, when a milk-faced cypher meekly made history first by being the greatest love in the life of a man later immortalized as a bloody tyrant, and then by bearing his madly-desired son.  Jane herself has been immortalized for her submissiveness - bound to obey and serve - and for being the one bright flame for a king hurtling viciously through darkness.

But what might Jane have really been - behind the legend ... and if she had survived ... ?

Catherine of Aragon's Other Claim to Fame

As the first (and longest-married) wife of King Henry VIII, Catharine of Aragon is widely famed for having fought that monarch to her literal death, for her right to be called Queen of England.  Though her being put aside had epochal ramifications for England, and for her matrimonially-obsessed ex/widower takes its fame for highly understandable reasons, it's a shame that she is often remembered for little *else* - and her accomplishments, even without her husband, were substantial.

Catherine as a young widow, Wikimedia

Take Flodden field.  Henry himself was in France, and Catherine, empowered as regent in the monarch's absence, authorized the response.  The Battle of Flodden Field was a great success for her, and for her beloved adopted homeland.  No less than Thomas Howard restored his family's honor on the field - and this opened the way for favor in the kings eyes which itself had ramifications in history.

For the 500th anniversary, the busy pace of archaeology in the United Kingdom continues apace, with this investigation.  It'll be an interesting story.

Beyond Baby Making - Kim Rendfield on Frankish Queendom

Though our periods are separated by centuries (The Ax and the Vase is set at the birth of the Merovingian dynasty; The Cross and the Dragon during the Carolingian), the legend of Frankish queens is common to both our research.  She writes that the role of women, particularly queens, went far beyond the imperative to provide heirs.

Queen Saint Clotilde, certainly, didn't earn that "Saint" honor by way of her passivity; she was an active participant in her husband's court; as was his rather less honorably famous mother, Basina.  Clotilde is known to have baptized one son without permission, to have worked with Bishop (also Saint) Remigius of Rheims in Clovis' conversion and eventual baptism.  She even gained some negative fame for her love of spending money on the Church - a tale remains that she defended her endowments, as not having come out of the royal treasury.  I even lifted a certain legend of a Frankish queen, who threatens an enemy with tonsure by sword through the neck, and attributed it to her in a scene involving one of the many conquests by Clovis of his own kinsmen.

In the excerpt in the sidebar at the right, "Queen", Clotilde's character is frankly little in evidence.  We've barely met her, at this point in Ax, and she is still very young, not yet sure of her position.  As she grows and thrives, we watch her shift from timidity to passion, and even occasional ferocity.  In the legend I mention above, it is a demonstration of power which leaves her shaken, but cements her esteem with her king and husband.

A great deal of time in my research was spent in the analysis, inventory, and understanding of grave goods.  Grave goods, far beyond simply examples of wealth, were also votive offerings.  At the very beginning of the novel, the famed bees of Childeric are a stark example of this, and later we see a dead infant buried with many snails, a mysterious and mystical evocation of protection, it seems.  The graves of women were fascinating, and one in particular is highly documented, including everything from the fine textiles the Frankish woman was dressed in, to the extremely rich and man-sized jewels with which she was bedecked.  The richness of this woman's grave is an illustration of the highly developed arts of the period - from clothing to carved gems to cloisonne' to fine personal tools and adornments.  More than anything, it testifies to the height of esteem this noble lady held - and hers is not a unique entombment.  Frankish women - queens and wealthy or noble ladies - had both wealth and power (as Clotilde testifies in her defense, as to not using the treasury, she used her *own* funds toward the gifts she gave to her religion).

The Death Scene.

Today, I reworked the scene in which Clovis gains his first heir, and loses his first love.  This is one I worked on recently, but somehow it brought me back once more.  So my word count isn't greatly down today, but the finer-tuning, fingers crossed, was a good choice.

This scene takes place pretty early in the going.  Theuderic, first prince of Clovis I, is older than those I refer to as "the Clotine princes" (sons of Queen Saint Clotilde), born extremely early in Clovis' reign, and many years before his marriage to the Queen.

Theuderic I, 19th C depiction

Without basis in history - perhaps only because of a White Liberal Guilt brand of need to confer on my characters some level of imperfection, I give to Theuderic a youthful palsy.  As he fights to overcome what would have been seen as a weakness or even a defect, Clovis himself fights the fear, for those early years, that he has not sired a healthy heir.

The death scene echoes with this - but, more than anything, it is the moment when a very young man indeed comes to understand his own love, in losing it.  I don't spend much time in philosophizing all this - part of what I need to do, after all, is to *shorten* this novel - but I hope the writing conveys a sense of the place mourning truly originates.  Because the other thing I am doing, at the same time, is plumbing the emotional depths of the character.

Right now, this scene has sort of exhausted me.  I've never lost a concubine to childbirth, but certainly on Father's Day, of all days, a sense of loss is never far away.  And I have lost love - at that age (Clovis would hardly have been seventeen), it is practically the order of the day to lose love, even if not in quite this context.

Clovis' own death scene (SPOILER!  He's dead now!) has made me cry.  This scene did not have this effect, but, as long as it's been since I dealt with Clovis' scene, this one probably means more to me.

Still, the thing is hard to deal with.  Writing, as much as I try to divorce myself from some of the more "passionate" cliche's about authors and poets, is an immensely personal emotional exercise.

And here it is 11:30 at night, and I am still not moving through the MSS like lightning, and wasting time on Blogger.  Of *course*.

Researching Clotilde

Like her husband, Queen Saint Clotilde's name is rooted on the term hludo, a root which also gave us the word loud, and which means famed.  It is often translated as "bright" or "shining" - but, for modern ease of understanding, I think "famed" makes more sense for precision and the intellectual transfer we must make for mental translation.  The cognate term loud explains the resonance - fame can come from a great noise.  But brightness, though I can understand why it is sometimes used, doesn't link to that cognate word (loud) and so doesn't create the chain of meaning quite the same way.

Clotilde, though ... maybe "bright" is a feminine term in my mind, maybe "shining" just captures some aspect of this woman in the same terms as the character I came to know, writing her ... I like the flash of light this translation represents.

Clovis - hludo and wiga - famed warrior.

Clotilde - hludo and tild - bright battle.

Each of their names carries a deep resonance for me as the author of characters inspired by these real people.    Battle might not seem an apt name for the Catholic saint who brought the first king in Gaul, the first king in Europe, to her Church.  Yet she did mount a campaign, and Clovis' conversion in the end has been marked as her victory.

In many ways, too ... relationships - marriages - are a battle.  I don't say that in some pejorative sense, nor the shallow-brained manner people affect, making unfunny jokes about opposite genders, or reducing lifetime commitments to battles of will.  Clotilde, as I encountered her, is more than capable of pitting our king to just such a battle.

But marriage is work.  Is now, was then, always has been, between people who want more of it - from each other - than exactly those shallow stereotypes I deny employing just above.  And if a couple are required to work together, at times it will engender clashes inward and outward as well.  Clovis and Clotilde come against one another from time to time (even as their relationship is durably powerful emotionally and physically), but also find themselves called to stand together and face challenges as well.

Bright battle.  Shining saint.  Remarkable woman.  This is my Queen ... Saint Clotilde.

Protagonist

There is a phrase, "hero of the story" which, in literature classes, is generally replaced with the term protagonist.  Of course, not all main characters are heroes - nor even likeable - and so we have to find a better option.

Clovis has many of the makings of a hero, and I did not write him as a villain - but he's hardly Dudley Do-Right.

Around Clovis cluster certain legends - there are those which cast him as a rapacious Barbarian (oh good lord, the whole BARBARIAN slur and bigotry ...), and at least as much hagiography, in memory of a practically legendary king, in memory of the Christian king, in honor of the father of France.

Then, of course, there are the howlers about the Merovingian Dynasty, which he founded.  The less said the better, there - if you look at the link, it's been done.

I don't know how many authors sit down with an ax to grind (for those who even get that pun ... my apologies), but I don't have the ability to write with any sort of didactic point in mind.  I'm not that convinced of my rectitude, for one, but mostly I don't care to get into arguments - and didactic writing begs for that dang guitarist to get noisy.

I also don't concentrate well on whitewashing a character.  The ones who approach me aren't necessarily nice people - but they do seem to be endowed with much that's worthwhile.  I can't make a hero out of a bad guy - I don't have any urge to - but to invite a character into my brain, there's got to be an attraction.


We know that Clovis was capable of spectacular violence.

Regardless of the sainted memory of Clotilde's conversion of her spouse and king to Catholicism, history appears open to the idea that his spiritual choices were at least partially politically motivated.

He appears to have been a continent husband, but family history is sometimes considered to be wildly bloody.  Even the saint herself is said to have incited her sons to hideous revenge on an uncle said to have murdered her own family.

History is, as it always is, loaded with contradiction and the fascination of pretty spectacular wickedness.  This is a part of what makes parts of it, and players within it, so interesting - and which also feeds the modern sense of superiority we so enjoy when looking down on things like Barbarians, the Dark Ages, medieval violence, even the learning of the past.

It's also loaded with protagonists we sometimes apologize for.


I don't apologize for Clovis.  I do present some of those familial crimes without the prejudice of a middle-aged, middle-class white broad with excesses of privilege, looking backward at a man whose power - whatever his personality - is without question.  I hope I provide a view of him without the mask of either violent legend or glowing sycophancy.  I hope he's as compelling outside my head as he has been for me for so long now - for good and ill, for feeling and wit, for what he did, and for even his failings.

Historical FICTION Some More

There's a fascinating thread at the Absolute Write fora right now, considering the question of how icky "historical mindsets" were.  There's a focus at this point on the specifics of women's position(s- because, kids, there have been more than one sets of context women had to live within!) in society, and I thought I'd share my bit.


***



I have to say, speaking as a feminist, I don't see how pretending-away the more difficult aspects of life for women (or ANYone) during a difficult period in history does me any favors today.  I find anachronistic female characters jarring and irritating precisely because ignoring the problems of any society (whether gender-based or otherwise) too apologistic and flip.

I'd agree with everyone who has pointed out that history isn't some sort of homogenized place where everyone held exactly the same viewpoints to exactly the same degree, in every station and every place across the board.  Women are enough a part of the population that even the most misogynistic systems were forced to accommodate at least some aspect of their participation in the world.  It's often been speculated, too, that in so-called "lower classes" there was less room for systematized chauvinism, as women had to contribute in order for all the work to be properly done.  I think there are limits to this theory, too, but it *has* given enough room for some authors to have created some excellent historicals based on this "wiggle room".

My own approach to female characters has varied somewhat.  Very early Frankish society was still in some flux, and my main female character happens to be a queen known almost entirely for her influence with her husband - but I depict a relationship between them fraught with its *own* difficulties, some of which do present in the context of a historical woman's actual position.  One woman is banished from society (the worst punishment possible) for sexual indiscretion, and another, as the victim of rape, witnesses her tormenter seriously punished (by the laws of [I]wergeld[/I], a woman in childbearing years was high in the heirarchy of human life value).  The second novel will deal with a woman of even higher noble station, in a much more ritualized society, who infracts against her system pretty spectacularly (she marries a slave at one point) and witnesses the consequences to others, of her actions.  This woman happens to be educated (letters of hers survive) and powerful, but in many ways has a much harder go of things as a woman precisely because of her attainment of power.  The price she'll pay is definitely owing to her gender, too.

In order to explore these things, to get down into their implications, for me as an author to ignore them would leave me writing a fairy tale, not a real story.  I can't and won't do that, and have a very hard time understanding why it would interest anybody to cleave away these things from a work of fiction.  Whatever their reasoning may be, they're asking for compromised storytelling - and fiction is compromised in enough ways just subjectively, I can't fathom good reasons to compromise it knowingly.  I don't understand the attraction to history, if one wants bits of it redacted or edited away.


***

Axing the Ax!

I was struck and amused at some of the ideas I'm bouncing off my SBC readers, and thought it was worth sharing, if only for the realization I came to in the final line of my note to these wonderful ladies ...

By the way, if you don't like having opening chapters of a novel "spoilered" - well, then, this contains spoilers. However, nothing of substance beyond the first few dozen pages will be ruined by this post.  If you're interested in "process", though - read on, because this is full-on authorial sausage-making!  (Note:  "Cloti" is my nickname for Queen Clotilde.  Other characters named are a mix of historical and fictional, mostly the latter.)


***



Kristi, to catch you up on brainstorming last weekend, Leila helped me to see that I could cut the character of Clovis’ older sister, Lanthechild (and her traitor husband, Gaianus) out of the novel.  Just because she existed doesn't mean she needs to exist in this novel!  This weekend, I decided I probably need to ditch Clovis’ own mini battle with trichinosis, too.  That thread doesn’t do anything but demonstrate Cloti’s administrative expertise, and I don’t think evidence of that is so short those scenes and their aftermath are worth preserving.  Your thoughts?

I’m also shifting the opening progression to move straight from Evochilde’s death to the battle with Syagrius, eliminating all the talk of horse breeds and cousin Wedelphus, and prep for five years, to tighten the progression of events.  It’ll be coronation, mother’s banishment, death of Evochilde, big battle, with very little exposition and blah-blah in between.  Any character I can eliminate, I need to - so if you think the little scribe boy, Merochar, needs to go, for instance, tell me.  For now, I’ve kept Mero since he does provide an ongoing thread through the novel - but he may not be essential, so throw ideas around there, too.

Pharamond’s parents may get to keep their names, but I may also eliminate the scenes where their deaths occur; it doesn’t add anything to the action, nor Clovis’ character (their deaths don’t even do much for Pharamond’s character, textually speaking!), so that will probably go.

Funny, how I can feel so “fertile” as a writer, coming up with so many darlings to kill!!

The Thing About Research

When I was researching Clovis, one of the things I found frustrating about the lack of direct and contemporary sources was the fact that this led to an awful lot of echoes.  "Facts" about his life are picked up and reported frankly, without citation and without clarity.  And thus does common wisdom become history.

Your less deeply analytical sources will repeat the knowledge that Clovis' baptism, for example, took place immediately upon his conversion.

Reading Ax is going to irritate these people.  Because I chose to hearken to other sources.  Sources which analyzed everything from the extent of Clovis' Romanization (did he really convert from Roman paganism? or was he a Thor sort of fellow?) to his dalliance with Arian Christianity to the likelihood of his wife's thirst for blood against her own uncles.

Gregory of Tours said Clovis was a Roman pagan, and an awful lot of pearl-clutching has gone on over the past century and a half or so, regarding how this is a terrible assertion to take at face value.  Historical scholarship needs its pearl-clutching, and I am glad people are willing to think twice about the word of a somewhat less than contemporary cleric not writing history quite to the standard we might (for little reason, really) expect of a scholar today.  Greg had a character to create, a point to make, and either he or Clovis himself was interested in making our man a second Constantine.  The patterns can be drawn ... and so one must ask oneself - how much of this is fact?

I actually used that template - the recreation of Constantine in Clovis - as a choice on the monarch's own part.  And it was this which led me to separate the baptism from the conversion.  Constantine was converted for a LOT of years before he had himself moistened over the whole thing.  And so I took Clovis' Christmas consecration and removed it by many years, too, from his dramatic battlefield conversion experience.

Even if I didn't accept this removal (which, for the record, I wholeheartedly *do*), the fact is that, as an author, the separation of these events provides opportunity for drama.  I am able to build in the tension of a man who has always believed himself descended from a (pagan) god renouncing the tenet of ANY divine descent at all, and setting the standard for Europe of divine *right* ... which is, in fact, ongoing today.  If any of you thinks Elizabeth II considers her position as a simple inheritance, like you or I might inherit a painting or a gold pocket watch - think again.  She expects of herself adherence to a divine placement in her throne.  And it may not be she is alone in looking at her seat that way.  And if she didn't think it her right, G-d-given (and a responsibility to live up to) it's unlikely she'd keep sitting there.

Fifteen hundred years, divine right has been with the cultures extant and born of Clovis' time - and decision.  He had a thing or two to do with the way the world has developed, this guy.

And even so, what we know about him from anyone who ever met him even once:  absolutely nada.

The story about five thousand of his followers following him to the altar right after the battle of Zulpich becomes history, when nobody who was there has a voice we can hear.

The tales of SAINT Clotilde's cruel whispers, to kill those uncles (we also hear sometimes as if it were hard-history) who murdered her father and mother (a mother who, there is POSSIBLE evidence, lived into the sixth century!), are repeated as fact.  Even by those who acknowledge her a saint.

The stories are good, to be sure.  I won't pretend I didn't cherry pick the ones I found most intriguing.

But read with care, *any* history.

And read with joy, historical fiction ...

Learning New Things Every Day ...

For all the research I did for Ax, I am embarrassed to note I don't think I ever realized St. Clotilde is the patron saint of adopted children.  A *number* of people I love very dearly indeed are adopted, so this is particularly interesting to me.  Huh.

Queen Saint Clotilde

I've posted a great deal about Clovis, the Merovingians, a bit about research, and historical fiction in general.  What I haven't discussed is my first major female lead - and what a lead I had in Clotilde.

The queen who converted her husband to Catholicism, who bore three princes and a princess for the dynasty, who rose to the status of legend - and who became a saint of her Church - was a challenge, but such a joyous one.

I understand well, but tend to shy away from, the tendency to draw feminist characters in a historical setting.  This puts no limit on the strength of personality, but also doesn't do the literary and social disservice of minimizing the extent of difficulty a woman (or any character at all) had, living in The Past.  Clotilde is a fortunate resource to have in my story, because she perhaps ranks with someone like Abigail Adams in both strength of personality, personal appeal, and persuasive capability (if not in her explicit support of women's rights  - heh).  So the challenge with her was to present the power this woman wielded - over a king no less - in the context of a world where feminine power was hardly dominant.

Another challenge, with Clotilde, was to portray the love story between a man and a woman, without disrespect for the fact that this woman - a character I needed to render as fully flesh and blood - happens to have become a Saint of the Catholic faith.  This aspect was not a major factor in my writing as I'm not an eroticist, but it was *there*, it was a thing that factored into Cloti's creation.  The idea of yanking the covers off a religious icon in flagrante delicto seems perhaps disrespectful, even if it doesn't ruffle my personal feathers to contemplate the sacred and human in one.

Clovis was a hell of a guy in this (literal - heh) respect, providing me with reasons not to get too salacious.  The legend of his father, Childeric, was that dad was so handsy with his female subjects that the men of the Salian Franks booted him out of town and offered his seat to the Roman governor.  This gave me a pretty obvious motivation for Clovis' later dispatch of selfsame governor's own son, but also provided compelling reason for the fact that Clovis does not come off, in history or legend, as any kind of letch.  He's known to have had one son before marrying Clotilde at the not insignificant age of about twenty-seven years.  Nothing is known of Theuderic's mother, but it seemed only fair to make her a concubine, if only because I am the writer and I get to indulge my fascinations - and the institute of marriage and concubinage going beyond (a) what I am personally familiar with and (b) the exoticized idea the term "concubine" tends to bring to mind for many Americans fascinates me.  Also, Theuderic is known to have inherited, and the legal status of friedlehe would certainly have conferred on any offspring the rights of any rightful heir.

So the first son gets a mom who freely chose her man, her status, and her child's future legal viability - and promptly exits, stage right.  Nice to know you, mystery first love!

Clotilde comes along significantly later.  Clovis has been on the throne, by the time he marries, a dozen years, not a lot less than half the span of his entire reign.  I bent the legend about their union a little, but put them together at the appropriate time, and with what I hope is appropriate enthusiasm for one another.  Clotilde may be a saint, but nobody ever called the mother of four a virgin - and I allow her the passion to love both her husband and her G-d.  I also allow their marriage enough reality to both contain and sustain conflict.

Such as Ingomer.

Clotilde actually bore not three princes, but four.  Ingomer was the firstborn between king and queen - and Ingomer also represents the major conflict between spouses pagan and Christian.  Clotilde had her son baptized, much against her husband's wishes - and, when he died, Clovis blamed her Christian G-d.  This may not be a Steinem-esque piece of self-actualization, but it was the palpably independent act of a woman within her time - both a figure of faith, and a strong-willed woman.  As a mother, this was a core-deep matter of importance to Clotilde - and yet, taking the step was not a minor infraction.

Likewise, it makes for not a minor piece of dramatic tension, too.  So bless her for being more than a little milquetoast.



Clovis' conversion, far from resulting in an immediate way from discussion with his queen, came while he was far from her - on the battlefield at Zulpich (Tolbiac).  To succumb to someone's influence when they are not directly exhorting someone speaks to both the power of the influence, and the power of the persuader.  Remote success in converting someone to a way of thinking means both that the seller of an idea, and the idea, have taken up residence under the skin.

Clotilde had serious power.  She had this both because her husband trusted and invested in her.  Probably because he was in love with/solicitous of her.  She had the charisma of a queen, as he had that of a king - a woman, like Helen, for whom such a man would do much, and a woman like Abigail, from whom a man would be willing to actually learn anything so fundamental as the matter of faith and religion.

I'll come back to Clotilde again, but had to begin some record of her.  I've been a little ill, so accept my apologies if this is a weak first chapter.  Still, I had to get something out.