In Wild, the writer and medievalist Amy Jeffs blends fact and fiction to “evoke and contextualise [Britain’s] ancient imaginative landscape”. Broadly covering the years 600-1000, a period of “migration, conversion and belief in monsters, demons, angels and omens in the sky”, the book comprises seven themed chapters: Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe and Paradise. Each begins with a short story inspired by objects or texts that have survived from early medieval times, and are rooted in their surroundings, after which Jeffs takes a closer look at the sources.
The first chapter opens with a ghost story, The Lament of Hos, in which a woman rises from her earthy resting place to revisit the site of her violent demise; there she was supposed to meet her lover, Ertae, but instead encountered a group of men, “their breath all drink and eels”, who beat and killed her. The inspiration for this shimmering tale is an Old English poem The Wife’s Lament, which features in the Exeter Book, a 10th-century anthology of verse, often known as the Old English Elegies, which is one of the largest surviving collections of early medieval literature (several of the original poems feature in Wild’s appendix).
