Introduction:
BettyJoyce Nash interviewed Valerie Nieman, author of Upon the Corner of the Moon. She and Nieman share a background in news reporting at the Greensboro News and Record, and both earned MFAs from Queens University of Charlotte.
A prolific novelist, Valerie Nieman’s latest book re-imagines Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She weaves literary legend and history into a page-turning suspense novel, the first of two volumes. She writes the young Macbeth and his lady within the historical record as they survive dynastic battles, meet, marry, and claim their legacies. Nieman builds the novel around women’s lives and spirituality, the power of storytelling, and complex politics of northern Europe. Upon the Corner of the Moon begins the story of actual people who had previously been fictionalized as emblems of evil.
Interview:
BettyJoyce Nash: Why Macbeth? You’ve mentioned an enduring memory of a theater performance.
Valerie Nieman: I was maybe twelve when I met Macbeth. I’d read the prose version of Shakespeare’s plays in Tales from Shakespeare (Charles and Mary Lamb), and my father knew I liked Shakespeare. He took me to see a performance by a traveling troupe that came through our rural Appalachian region. It was my first time seeing live theater. The characters really stuck with me. I don’t act – though I just did a fun hybrid show with Queen Charlotte’s Villeins — but I enjoy theater, especially Shakespeare.
BJN: How did you even begin writing this ambitious a novel?
Valerie Nieman
VN: I’ve been working on it so long that the beginning has faded away. I’d been researching a different novel when I learned that basically everything we think we know about Macbeth is wrong. That captured my interest, so I started reading and kicking the idea around. I thought, I’m going to write this. But I’d never written historical fiction and didn’t know much about medieval history. This was in the 1990s; I kept on researching and tinkering even as I wrote other books. The book’s direction changed a lot but I always knew it would be the story of Gruach and Macbeth.
BJN: How do the varied points of view serve the story?
VN: Gruach’s first-person voice allows us to identify most closely with her so that we can understand her story and women’s difficult lives in this time. Macbeth’s point of view is a third-person perspective, essential to show the male world of politics and warfare. Their stories run parallel until they cross. Lapwing, the poet-seer, is a catalyst, an instigator. He seized an opportunity to manipulate Crinán, the powerful lay abbot of Dunkeld, with the prophecy of his son Duncan’s elevation to king.
BJN: We’re introduced to the main characters while they’re kids, which binds readers to them right away.
VN: I realized that if I started with them as adults, people wouldn’t connect because they would immediately think of Shakespeare’s versions—the “out, out damned spot.” So I built them and the world they lived in. This effectively roots readers to Macbeth and Gruach, daughter of an heir to the throne of Alba. I have Duncan being raised along with Macbeth—they are “fostered together”—with sibling rivalry and competition between the cousins. It was standard for children to be sent to grow up with other noble families.
BJN: Prophesies and saints and supernatural figures abound.
VN: Yes, those were not fantasies to people living in this era. Lapwing calls on the gods. St. Columba opposes him. Gruach, who as a flighty girl tried to invoke the image of the man she would marry, has visions of the ancient triple goddess to whom she’s dedicated.
The challenge and joy of historical fiction lie in recreating a bygone time, while showing characters as real people whose daily lives we can understand. When Gruach gets her first period, it’s a terrifying transition into adulthood and a new set of problems. Likewise, when boys are trying to be perceived as men, the mechanisms by which they prove themselves may differ from today’s efforts, but the emotions are much the same.
BettyJoyce Nash
BJN: You’re writing from “history,” and a “real” Macbeth ruled Scotland from 1040-1057. What, if anything, did you glean from researching “that” Macbeth?
VN: One thing that made me tear my hair out was misinformation. Many sources say that Macbeth was a usurper, but they didn’t understand the ancient Celtic system of electing a king. The mechanism at that time was that the king would name a tanist, a ‘king in waiting.” This was someone the king hoped to see as his successor, the way a president might push his VP for president. But when the king died, the noblemen would gather and elect the person they thought would be the strongest ruler. The tanist was not guaranteed the throne, unlike with primogeniture where the eldest child automatically becomes ruler.
BJN: Share some of your research nooks and crannies—books, papers, historical documents, and what you found.
VN: We don’t have a lot from that period—remember that there were wars and wars and wars, Henry VIII tearing down monasteries, and the strict Scottish Reformation, during which people painted over frescoes and broke statues. None of this is conducive to keeping records. I used king lists and the sagas, poems from the Irish and Anglo-Saxons. I relied on secondary sources such as the book of medieval penances that I found on the “free” rack at Edward McKay’s in Greensboro. If you killed your brother, or gouged out someone’s eye or killed someone’s sheep, there was a specific penance. One book amazed me—an 18th century survey of the Province of Moray. That’s centuries after Macbeth, but [I found] lots of detailed information about region — the quality of soil, what sites tended to freeze early, where there’s clay or stone. It was meant to help the crown set and collect taxes, but I used that information to build the tapestry of life in this “home base” for Macbeth.
One really important source, when I was trying to figure out the female-centered religion into which Gruach is initiated, was The White Goddess by Robert Graves. I learned immense amount about ancient systems of prophecy through alphabets and trees and stones that was also essential in developing Lapwing. Another valuable source was Macbeth Before Shakespeare by Benjamin Hudson of Penn State. I went to Scotland twice to hike around to medieval sites and museums, but the climate is also not conducive to the keeping of history. Most of the early medieval constructions were of earth and wood. Fortifications were sacked and burned, people robbed away the useful stones, and then new ones were built over the ruins.
BJN: Your prose is striking and original. Even an “ordinary” weather report, from Macbeth’s point of view while hunting: “The wind dropped. Before he could be thankful for the lull, the wind slammed back from a new quarter, toothed with hail.” Or this: “The light was greenish, the color of corruption. It leaked from the edges of the low, black clouds. Lightning forked.”
VN: I wanted [the language and dialogue] to feel like it came out of a human being’s mouth, representing who they were and how they saw the world. Lapwing, for instance, speaks in riddles and metaphors. Macbeth is a bookish kid, later turned warrior, so those elements had to be there [in his voice.] He was classically educated but also a son of his time when what you were trained to do as a nobleman was fight. There is a worldview behind the language: In Gaelic, for instance, you don’t say, “I’m sad,” you say, “A sadness has come upon me.” As for the general prose, I drew metaphors from the setting and time period, trying to make sure there were no anachronisms.
BJN: Thank you for these insights into your novel as well as this intriguing historical era.
Read Ed Davis’s review of Upon the Corner of the Moon.
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