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ninakinsmn 's review for:
The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World
by Shelley Puhak
In my senior year in college, I took a course on early German language and literature, which involved translating portions of the Nibelungenlied from Middle High German into modern German and then into English. Little did I know that this important work of German literature (and by extension the works of one of my favorite composers, Richard Wagner) was likely inspired, at least in part, by a pair of real-life Merovingian queens, Brunhild of Austrasia, and her sister-in-law, Fredegund of Neustria, who vied for power for several decades in a Dark Age version of “Game of Thrones”, replete with poisonings, stabbings, assassinations, battles of brother against brother, accusations of witchcraft, and the occasional dismemberment. When I found out there was a book about them, I just had to get a copy.
In this work of narrative nonfiction, Shelley Puhak does an excellent job of reconstructing the lives of Brunhild and Fredegund based on the fragmentary primary source materials that survived the ravages of time, informed by secondary sources and some educated guesswork. A thorough academic history of their lives would be difficult, if not impossible, to write, as is the case with many people and events in the Dark Ages, because of the scarcity of high quality primary sources. The author’s task in this particular case was rendered even more difficult by the fact that the enemies of these two powerful women tried very hard to erase any records about them that might reveal how much influence they had on events in this highly patriarchal era of history. The author has to resort to a lot of speculative statements to tell her tale (i.e., “she must have felt” or “it probably was”), but, for the most part, her suppositions felt plausible to me and the resulting narrative is engaging and enjoyable.
In this work of narrative nonfiction, Shelley Puhak does an excellent job of reconstructing the lives of Brunhild and Fredegund based on the fragmentary primary source materials that survived the ravages of time, informed by secondary sources and some educated guesswork. A thorough academic history of their lives would be difficult, if not impossible, to write, as is the case with many people and events in the Dark Ages, because of the scarcity of high quality primary sources. The author’s task in this particular case was rendered even more difficult by the fact that the enemies of these two powerful women tried very hard to erase any records about them that might reveal how much influence they had on events in this highly patriarchal era of history. The author has to resort to a lot of speculative statements to tell her tale (i.e., “she must have felt” or “it probably was”), but, for the most part, her suppositions felt plausible to me and the resulting narrative is engaging and enjoyable.