Dear Reader,
I want to let you know just how important this novel is to me. I have always been deeply interested in the evolution of humanity and society into what we see today.
About five years ago I became intrigued with Viking culture through various books, YouTube videos, and the very well made TV show Vikings. I was struck by the deeply rooted polytheism and how they allowed women to become warriors and wield greater amounts of social autonomy than I’ve observed in other ancient societies.
As my rabbit hole got deeper and deeper, I started to wonder: Did the Vikings ever encounter Black or brown people? Could there have been such a thing as a Black Viking?
My research then became rigorous. I discovered the story of Thorhall the Hunter, a character from the Old Norse saga of Erik the Red, who served as Erik’s right-hand man on his escapades in Vinland. Thorhall is described as being dark-skinned, and some speculate that the “real” Thorhall—the historical figure whom the character may have been based on—could have been a Black man. I also discovered that Vikings from Norway made it as far down as Morocco in their quest to plunder new shores, meaning they likely had at least some interaction with Arabs and Africans. Maybe even more important, though, I discovered just how difficult it is to find substantial information on early medieval African history. It struck me that I’d been taught so much more about Western history than about the history of my own ancestors. And that Black and brown people’s enormous contributions to civilization—and the ways in which people of all different races learned from one another throughout the Middle Ages—have been erased from our understanding of the past. (I want to explicitly thank my parents for having so many informative books on the subject when I literally couldn’t find them anywhere else.)
Thus the character of Yafeu started to take shape in my mind. As a young Black woman with a platform, I am part of the fight to give marginalized characters a voice. Yafeu struggles not just because she’s a woman in a patriarchal society, but also because she’s a Black person in a white culture. And those two aspects of her identity birth new struggles that are faced by neither Black men nor white women. I’m glad to live in a time when feminism is finally starting to become both intersectional and mainstream; when feminists are starting to care about more than just the struggles of white women, and people across all kinds of divides are eager to inhabit the subjectivities of “others.” Nowadays, a story can have a young Black female protagonist without being categorized as a show, movie, or book that is “for” Black people alone.
But even as I was developing Yafeu’s character, I knew that her journey wasn’t the full story. There was something more that I wanted to say. Yafeu is clearly a badass. She’s strong and powerful in ways that are universally recognizable. But there are many other kinds of strength and power, and many different paths to finding one’s own expression of those two things. What is to be said of the women who find strength in spirituality, or the “soft power” of interpersonal skills? Women come in all different sizes, shapes, colors, religions, personalities. Our definitions of strength and power should reflect this diversity.
That’s how I came up with Freydis. Yafeu and Freydis are opposites in many ways. They have a different set of strengths and weaknesses, different wants and needs, different self-expressions—but they are equal in strength and beauty. And they need each other to create a world that they both can thrive in.
We all find it difficult to connect with those who have beliefs that actively oppose our own. When we assume that someone is “other,” we dehumanize and ostracize them, making it impossible to communicate in the ways that are necessary to create any semblance of human decency.
We have a tendency to compare our pain and suffering—or ignore each other’s altogether. It doesn’t help that male-dominated media tend to portray women as competitive with one another, as pitted against each other (in fights that are usually over men—or over male conceptions of power). But I believe that radical equality can’t happen until we stop keeping one another at a distance. We must be willing to search for some kind of common ground, while at the same time celebrating what makes us unique. We can build something beautiful together if we have the willingness and the compassion to do this.
With Yafreby—the Norse-African city that Yafeu and Freydis found together, complete with its own pidgin language—I imagine the new form of community that would be born from enacting that philosophy. Yafreby is what cultural blending would look like if one culture wasn’t dominant over the other. Ultimately, that’s what Black Shield Maiden is really about, that’s the theme that lies at its heart: connection and community. I hope that reimagining the past through this ancient lens will open up new possibilities for more connection and community in our own future.
Something else happened in the writing of this story, and especially in the process of developing the secondary characters. I realized that, in my quest to portray a variety of manifestations of strength and power, I ended up creating characters that were “gender fluid”—men who had so-called feminine qualities, and women who had so-called masculine qualities. My generation is evolving past the outdated binaries of gender, sexuality, and gender expression.
Women my age can wear traditionally masculine clothing without being called “boyish” or “gay.” Men my age can paint their nails and wear eyeliner without being called “girlish” or “gay.” Your self-expression is just that—personal to you. I wanted my characters to reflect this societal shift, to resonate with the young people of my generation. Ultimately, though all the characters in Black Shield Maiden make sense for the circumstances of their time, they remain modern characters at heart. And their journeys are timeless.
Willow Smith