Pagans and Christians and Jews, Oh My!

In The Wolf and the Woodsman, the 2021 debut novel by Ava Reid, the protagonist is a young woman who is abducted by soldiers of the evil king, wins the heart of the rightful heir to the throne, discovers her hidden magical powers, and saves the kingdom. I am admittedly not the audience for this kind of popular contemporary fantasy, with its goth girl heroine whose every feeling is chronicled for us—or, rather, the same three feelings over and over again, like a teenager’s diary. I am also on record as a critic of the whole premise of fantasies that may wear historical costumes or take place in supposedly exotic worlds but give us characters who are entirely contemporary in their mentalities, liberal (in the philosophical, not political sense) 21^st-century selves evaluating things according to liberal 21^st-century desires.

That said, Reid’s novel is competently written. The prose is standard contemporary novelese, with some nice touches. Technical problems are those of pacing and proportion: an overuse of infodumps, and too much repackaged European folklore told as stories by the protagonist. Even her smitten Prince Charming, Gáspár, asks her to stop when she launches into yet another decorative folktale, but to no avail:

“Perhaps I’ll tell you anyway,” I say, clambering back on my mount. “Unless you can think of some way to silence me.”
            “Enough,” Gáspár murmurs, a low warning. His fingers are clenched tight around the reins, but he doesn’t give another word of protest.
            And so I speak into the green silence, wind scarcely rustling the slender elms.
            “Once there was only Isten, alone in the Upper-World…”

Poor Gáspár.

Although The Wolf and the Woodsman, with its girl-boss heroine and cruel-captor-turned-sensitive-lover romance, is clearly pitched to young women, it occurs to me that it is not all that different from the sword-and-sorcery fantasies typically beloved of young men. If you take Reid’s 400+ page tome, cut out the emotional data and streamline the prose, you would have a 200 page pulp fantasy: a barbarian girl who slays monsters and enemies, roams the kingdom, conquers cartoonish villains, and acquires all the things she wants. By the same token, if a Conan type had lots of feelings, at least all the acceptable ones for a contemporary liberal American readership, and sought, not a kingdom, or a temporary concubine, or to get back on the road again, but marriage to the princess and a happy ending, the result might be not all that different from The Wolf and the Woodsman.

But all this is to leave out a major aspect of Reid’s novel, which is the particular cultural and historical material she works with. She has set her fantasy in a version of medieval Europe with slightly altered names. The kingdom of the novel is a medieval and tenuously Christianized Hungary, its rulers still suspicious of the pagans within its borders, and at war with a rival that appears to be Ottoman. The protagonist, Evike, has been raised in one of the pagan villages; the Christians of the book call her a “wolf-girl,” because of this background. The pagan populations have been decimated by the soldiers of the Christian rulers, and now live a tenuous and subaltern existence within the kingdom.

This cultural-religious-historical matrix is not only the novel’s setting, however. It is also the novel’s subject. When not retelling Hungarian folktales and chronicling the steamy interactions between wolf-girl and prince, Reid’s novel is engaged in something like a civilizational critique, purporting to explain what is wrong with medieval European culture and how it might be solved, at least in fantasy form and with the right wolf-girl to lead the way. This is the same project as Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, with which Reid’s novel has been much compared for marketing purposes.

The critique amounts to this: if people would just stop having powerful commitments to family, faith, and community then they would never have conflicts over them. These medievals, the book suggests, are pointlessly consumed with spite and malice generated by their conviction that they have access to truth. They should instead act like contemporary liberal subjects, mobile consumers in the shopping mall of lightly worn identities. If I am impatient with this kind of book it is not because I would justify the genocidal crusades of medieval religions, but because I think this kind of diagnosis is simplistic, false, and disguises its own brutalities, the coercive power of modern liberal regimes. It also makes for an ultimately boring sort of fantasy, about as adventurous as the average conversation in a Starbucks.

Christianity in Reid’s novel is called “the Patrifaith,” and worships a bullying deity named “Godfather Life.” It mostly consists of killing non-Christians and engaging in self-mutilation as a path to godliness. As proof of faith, males are required to cut their hair—or more: “Only the most dedicated and pious boys part with more than their hair. An eye, an ear, a pink sliver of tongue. Their littlest fingers or the tips of their noses. By the time they’re men, many of them are missing tiny pieces.” Since Reid makes the dominant religion in the novel’s world little more than an oppressive and fanatical sado-masochism, it seems no loss—indeed, it is urgent—for it to be replaced by her modern multiculturalism.

To her credit, Reid does not simply present paganism as the enlightened, compassionate alternative to Christianity, popular as this framing has become today. Certainly, the matriarchal paganism of the novel is an improvement on Reid’s hideous Christianity. Yet it is also prone to its own cruelties. This does not take the form of genocidal warfare as it does in the case of the Christians, but rather a pagan “mean girls” culture in which the protagonist Evike is tormented by the other girls in the village because she alone lacks magical powers (which are discovered later in the book). In particular, there is one popular blonde girl pagan, Katalin, who bullies Evike until Evike saves her life at the end of the book and they become friends. Their interactions are very high school:

            “I never wanted you to die for me, idiot.”
            “It certainly seemed like you did,” I say, “given how much you tormented me.”
            “I wasn’t the best—”
            “You were terrible,” I cut in.

Evike alone does not participate in the stubborn inhumanity of the religious cultures of her world. This is because she is an outsider, marginal to both the pagan village and Christian kingdom in which she lives. Her mother, it is true, was a pagan, abducted and killed by the Christians. Her outsider status, though, derives from her father, whom she has not seen since she was little, and who is a Jew.

The third religious culture Reid gives us in the novel are the Jews, or the Yehuli, as Reid calls them (a single letter change from yehudi, or “Jew” in Hebrew). The Jews, peaceful, literate, and persecuted, come across by far the best in Reid’s novel. Unlike Christians and pagans, they are accepting of outsiders, as the half-Jewish Evike discovers when she travels to the capital city and finds her father Zsigmond in the Jewish community there. Evike is warmly embraced by the Jews. Surprised, she asks a young Jewish woman, Jozefa, “Why have you been so kind to me?”

The question is not the one I intended to ask, but it rises up without me realizing it. “Why wouldn’t we be?” Jozefa counters, brow lowering. “Zsigmond has been alone nearly all his life; it was difficult to watch. Now he’s learned the daughter he thought was dead is alive after all—why should we take offense that her mother was some pagan woman?” “Because I’m only half—” I start, and then stop abruptly, because Jozefa is looking at me as if I really am simple. “Some on this street might not like it,” she says. “But I think it’s Patritians who care more about measuring blood.”

Unlike Christians and pagans, the Jews emphasize literacy, reading, and—above all—questioning their sacred texts.

It seems like a strange thing to me, that you should have to study from a book in order to properly worship the Yehuli god. No one in Keszi can read, and the Patritians make it sound like their god is something you ought to know, or else not ask too many questions about. Zsigmond scrawls questions into the very margins of his scrolls, underlining passages that he agrees with and marking up ones that he doesn’t. All of it baffles me. Can you believe in something while still running your hand over its every contour, feeling for bumps and bruises, like a farmer trying to pick the best, roundest peach?

“That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”

This retrojection of a somewhat contemporary Judaism (Reform as regards matrilineal descent) into the medieval past helps make Reid’s Jews additionally sympathetic in the context of the novel. And Reid’s description of Evike’s tentative first encounters with her Jewish heritage—learning the Hebrew alphabet, attending synagogue for the first time, eating challah on the sabbath—are all quite sweet.

Yet the Jewish culture in this fantasy is not much more substantive than the Christian or pagan cultures. Reid’s stock of Jewish lore consists of just two stories: the biblical story of Esther (with, helpfully, its female heroine, genocidal villain, and no mention of God), and the all but inevitable golem legend. That the golem story dates from centuries after her novel’s setting and is not particularly Jewish escapes Reid, but it links the book with other contemporary fantasies that similarly celebrate modern liberal autonomy, yet want a tad of Jewish tradition too, such as Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni and Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther.

What is most important about the Jews of Reid’s fantasy, as every other culture in her fantasy world, is that Evike gets to choose or reject it. She will, as she says, “decide whether I want to be Yehuli or not.” This is the operative fantasy of The Wolf and the Woodsman and much contemporary fantasy. It is a wish fulfillment for contemporary readers who want an imaginative simulacrum of thick communities and traditions while maintaining the supremacy of the liberal self and its desires as the ultimate metric of worth and meaning.

Such liberal fantasies require villains who represent a caricature of tradition as relentlessly oppressive and cruel. “I will enjoy killing you, wolf-girl,” says the fanatic Christian villain of Reid’s novel, all but twirling a mustache. “This time, I’ll make sure it sticks.” Since there are no positive frameworks for traditional forms of belonging and culture, such fantasies also require innocent and immediately sympathetic victims, the functional role played in this case by the Jews, threatened with expulsion, humiliation, and massacre. As Evike reflects, “Perhaps I have no right to worry over the fate of the Yehuli when the only slender threads yoking me to them are a coin I can’t read and a father I can scarcely remember.” Since communities for Reid are either ones that are provisionally chosen by the individual, or suffocating herds, the historical reality of anti-Jewish persecution gives this community a moral value—as does its refashioning along contemporary post-traditional lines—and lets Evike at least consider whether or not she wishes to join it (and, presumably, leave it, should it cease to meet her needs).

The happy ending offered by the book is therefore precisely a vision of individual autonomy and multicultural syncretism, pagans and Woodsmen (Christian soldiers) creating new ritual fusions.

It’s no easy thing, Woodsmen and pagans sharing a feast table, the precarious inauguration of a new tradition. We have already killed three sheep in a sacrifice to Isten, and the Woodsmen clasp their hands to thank the Prinkepatrios for his bounty before picking up their knives to eat. It helps that they have brought carafes of wine in their saddlebags, and sachets of spices, and even skeins of dyed wool for weaving. Virág leads Gáspár to the head of the feast table and then sits at his elbow. We eat and drink until our lips are wine-stained and our bellies are too full under our tunics.

This is an American non-denominational Thanksgiving. But also, by emptying culture of positive content apart from folktales and challah, it shows how liberal society offers a model of peaceful comity based on foodways.

Evike and her prince ride off at the end to be married. Gáspár, like Evike, also belongs to multiple cultures and to none: he is the rejected heir of a Christian father, and the son of a Merzani (Turkish) mother. Like Novik’s Spinning Silver, Reid ends the book before uncomfortable questions can be asked about children, choices, and future generations. Liberal fantasy is an escape from real-world truths about cultural continuity, not an attempt to grapple with them.

We can nevertheless surmise that, even if Evike chooses “to be Yehuli,” it is highly unlikely that any sons born to her and Gáspár will be circumcised. That central Jewish observance is, after all, a direct and intimately physical contradiction of liberalism’s idea that individual choice and autonomy supersede the claims of faith and family. Interestingly, circumcision is never brought up in connection with the novel’s Jews, even as Reid’s Christians and pagans are constantly lopping off pieces of themselves to gain magical powers from their deities. Yet Evike makes it clear throughout the book that she is uncomfortable with religions that ask their adherents to remove parts of their bodies. “And why,” she asks, “does a perfect being demand blood from little boys?”