The appeal of fantasy for a woman in a male-dominated world is — in a word — obvious. That aside, my love affair with fantasy started as a small child because something deep and powerful in my core has always called out to the existence of dragons, fairies and magic. Since the tender age of four, I’ve been desperate to pull them into my reality. It’s no wonder movies like Sleeping Beauty, Princess Bride, and Sword in the Stone were my favorites.
Drawing from medieval times in particular is a common theme in high fantasy, where we often see knights with gallant ethical codes
and stunning senses of chivalry. In one way or another, I imagine this idea appeals to many people, some as the knight on a quest to prove their merit and find their glory, while others are drawn to the love interest looking to be treated for once with the utmost care and respect. (Then, there are those of us who just want to gnash our teeth and sit on a pile of gemstones while breathing fire, but that’s another story.) When writing Wings of Life, I knew I wanted to blend some aspects of the Middle Ages and Viking Age together, but I also had a deep sense of justice in wanting to right some wrongs along the way.
Our heroine, Serae of Cavendaffe, is sent to the enemy kingdom Rihtlond as betrothed to the heir of the high dane. In Rihtlond, she is thrust into the center of a seafaring warrior clan bearing some Viking inspirations. However, I developed this culture around the idea of squashing gender norms, starting with one of our most powerful tools — language. Rihtish was built with feminine, masculine and gender-neutral titles. This was not the case in Old Norse, nor even in modern English, thus holding a kernel of one wrong I wanted to set right. While English is largely a language of genderless nouns, we still see so many title pairs in our language of feminine and masculine—queen/king, lady/lord, duchess/duke, etc. This leaves us with a heavy task to adapt our language to be more inclusive, which is a tall order. I crafted Rihtish to intentionally go against this, including a third all-inclusive title that is often used as the dominant word, eliminating the need to squabble over gender.
Other archaic ideas, such as male inheritance and female ownership, I threw out the window in Rihtlond entirely. There, anyone can be a warrior, a tailor, a chef or a blacksmith. Further, any gender can ascend to the role of ruler, whether they identify as a woman, man or nonbinary. They haven’t eliminated a full separation of class, but they’ve gone a long way from the staunch divide common to medieval times (and Serae’s homeland), where we saw peasantry, nobility and very little in between. Serae comes from a culture where her worth is determined by the value of the marital match she can make, but when she goes to Rihtlond, she discovers a world where women have every bit as much autonomy and authority as men. Or, as the Riht might say, all people have equal worth.
This tugs on my heartstrings, whereas in my own life I have experienced sexism and have grown up hearing even worse stories from the older women in my family. The process of rewriting a culture to be more inclusive and empowering to all genders was cathartic. I allowed myself to indulge in nuggets from the past. I have found the fantasy genre can romanticize warriors in armor, sword fighting, distant journeys at sea and a unique connection to forests. At the same time, I granted myself the freedom to erase and replace some of the harsher realities, giving Wings of Life a breath of optimism in an otherwise increasingly dystopian world.