INSIDE VOICES

INSIDE VOICES

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Valerie Nieman

Valerie Nieman is the author of novels and short story and poetry collections. Her novel In the Lonely Backwater won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award and was a Foreword Indies Book of the Year finalist. Her critically acclaimed work includes To the Bones and Blood Clay. She has held a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. She is a professor emerita at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. She is also a former journalist.

Jeffrey/Inside Voices: Why did you feel compelled to write the story of Macbeth?

The murderous tyrant that we know as Macbeth first became part of my life when I found a blue-bound copy of Tales from Shakespeare in the tall bookcase at home. Charles and Mary Lamb rewrote the plays into prose, making them accessible even for a (too young) reader. I also remember my father quoting Shakespeare, especially, “I have lived long enough; my way of life/ Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf…”  from Act V. 

My father took me to see a touring production of Macbeth when I was tween-age, my first time attending professional theater. I remember the dramatic lighting and sound effects, the rags of the witches as they circled the cauldron, the clashing of swords—but mostly the poetry. This was my first encounter with the Bard on stage, and it would shape my entire life as a writer and poet and teacher. 

The proximate cause of my Macbeth obsession came when, while doing research for an earlier novel, I learned that that Macbeth was a genuine historical figure, a successful king who ruled from 1040 to 1057 and not a murdering usurper.  Of his wife, we know little more than her name, Gruach. 

The true story of the Macbeths has haunted me for many years. I read and studied, continued to work on the novel, did more research, set it aside while I wrote and published five other novels as well as books of poetry. Something had set its hook in me and would not let me go until I told the tale. 

Robert/Inside Voices: Why did you begin the story with the childhoods of the main characters?

There’s a whole lot of baggage attached to the name Macbeth. It’s the name you cannot say in theaters – it’s that Scottish play. And whatever else you might remember about the play, perhaps the marching trees, you’ve certainly heard the line “out, out, damn’d spot” used in advertising and cartoons and skits and on and on. 

Because of this deep cultural antipathy, nurtured over hundreds of years, I couldn’t just leap into Macbeth and his wife at the height of their adulthood, as crowned monarchs. That was too high a hurdle. We’re charged as writers with creating characters who are compelling, believable, often sympathetic. If I was to explore and expand them as individuals, even redeem them, then I had to start from their youth.

That decision was also necessary because the Alba of the 11th century is far different from the Scotland that readers immediately imagine, with kilts and bagpipes and Bonnie Prine Charlie. Just as though I were creating an alien planet, I had to do a lot of world-building. How did people travel? Was there coinage? What were the expectations for boys and girls at differing levels of society? Food, clothing, weapons, medicines, beliefs about gods and understanding of nature—I had to consider all those things to write historical fiction rather than loosely constructed fantasy.

We all world build, as fiction writers, but this was a challenging task. It’s a good thing I like doing research. 

Jeffrey/Inside Voices: We think we know about Macbeth because of Shakespeare’s play, but who were the historical Macbeths?

Macbeth was a rightful king through the traditional Celtic system, ruled for 17 years, and was hailed in his own time as the “ruddy king of plenty” and “The Righteous.” How did he become a villain, and why? I learned that efforts to tar Macbeth’s legacy began even before his death, as Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore—raised in England and English in thoughts and habits—claimed the throne through primogeniture and then sought to boost his dynasty’s legitimacy. Over time, chroniclers merged Macbeth’s history with various legends and fairy tales to shape a monstrous, murdering usurper. When Shakespeare went looking for a story, he found this one in Holinshed’s Chronicles, which had brought together these earlier versions and shaped the story to promote the Stuart line. The witches were another nod toward his patron, King James I, who was fascinated by witches and even wrote a book, Daemonologie, about how to find and destroy them. 

Scotland in the early 11th century was a loosely organized nation called Alba. It was first settled in the Neolithic, then saw waves of peoples including the first great kingdom, the people who battled the Romans to a standstill. The Romans called them Picts, but we know little of their history because they did not leave a written language. Elegant symbols carved on pillars may mark marriages, land boundaries, treaties, or graves. They seem to indicate, as history also reports, that the Picts were matrilineal. The Gaelic-speaking Scots arrived from across the Irish Channel and moved up the Great Glen, merging with the Picts through warfare and intermarriage and the influence of Christianity. The Norse and Danish invaders called the Lochlannach took and settled parts of Moray, as well as Ireland and the Hebrides, and raided all around the coastlines. Then came the English, moving up from Northumbria and controlling Lothian until Malcolm II defeated them, and finally the Normans who fled to Macbeth’s protection – but that’s in the second book. Alba was quite the melting-pot.

Scotland began to take its current shape in the time of Macbeth. Although Orkney and the territories to the north and west were still controlled by the Danes and Norse, Malcolm II conquered Lothian, and then annexed Strathclyde, an ancient British kingdom centered on the Firth of Clyde. It would fall to Macbeth, a child of the “Land Beyond the Mounth” and King in the North like his father before him, to finally weld that ancient and quasi-independent polity to Alba.

As to “Lady Macbeth,” we know little more than her name and her father’s name and perhaps her brother’s. We do know that she was first married to a man called Gillecomgan, who was killed in battle by Macbeth, and then married Macbeth. Her son Lulach was adopted by Macbeth.

Because we know so little about her, I had wide latitude to create her life. Her father Boidh was Malcolm II’s tanist, a position of power but also peril. I had him send his children to obscure fosterage in the north, in territory claimed by Orkney, to protect him from the monarch who would have him and others killed. It was there that Gruach would be raised and instructed in the rites of the ancient goddess. I had to do a great deal of speculation in building a plausible life for her, but I always drew on scholarship and hope I’ve not strayed too far afield.

Robert/Inside Voices: Historical fiction requires a great deal of research in order to get it right. Tell us about your research process.

My research began a long time ago, with interlibrary loan books. (This was in the early 1990s.) I remember ordering a Survey of the Province of Moray: Historical, Geographical and Political, thinking I would get a reproduction, but the brown paper package contained an original 1798 volume! I was enthralled by the specificity of soils and stones, trees and crops, rivers and harbors, in the northeastern part of Scotland that is “Macbeth land.”

I continued to read widely and deeply in history, mythology, the Celtic Church, women’s spirituality, the Picts, and the politics of northern Europe in the age between the Viking incursions and the Norman Conquest. But for me, research is more than dusty books, so I bought a new backpack and hiking boots in 2014 and a plane ticket to Glasgow. The Great Glen Way would be my first ever through-hike, 77 miles over five days. At age 59. I needed to see the land, the plants and trees, the birds and animals. 

For previous work set in Appalachia and North Carolina, I was able to draw on my life history and environment, but Scotland was just a place seen in photographs, and I could not write about a place unvisited. Although little remains from my period, 1000-1050 AD—grass-covered ruins, Pictish symbol stones and standing stones from even earlier times—I gained a sense of the landscape. I spent a lot of time in the north, especially Orkney and the area known as Moray for centuries. This was where Macbeth’s family ruled, his power base. I walked along sea cliffs and visited ancient fortifications at Burghead. I came to know the land where one of the major scenes of Shakespeare’s play takes place, the hard heath near Forres. That’s where Macbeth encounters the dreadful witches.

In 2023, I returned to wander in many more locations important to the book, while also spending fruitful days in the National Library and the National Museum of Scotland. I visited the Aberdeenshire coast and the valley of the River Dee, where sites linked to Macbeth’s story include the place of his last battle, an almost-erased hill fort at Lumphanan, not Dunsinane of the play. 

Jeffrey/Inside Voices: You traveled to Scotland as part of your preparation for writing the book. What stood out to you during your travels?

The history is compelling and the landscapes magnificent, but it’s the people who live in my thoughts.

The women who saved me: More than I’ll enumerate here. The woman who ordered me into her Land Rover when I’d missed the turn in pouring rain and was walking down the road. “It’s all twisty bits ahead, you’ll be run over!” The woman who gave me a lift to my B&B in Spean Bridge after I missed another signpost, walked a long way and had to backtrack. Janet at Abriachan Woods teahouse, midway on a long section of the GGW, who brewed me ginger and lemon in a battered silver pot. Her tea and encouragement kept me on my feet. 

The musician: Mr. Scott on the work boat/ferry plowing through the North Sea to the furthest of the Orkney Islands, North Ronaldsay. “Do you mind if I play?” he asked me and the only other passenger, then broke out a set of small pipes and gave us a lovely concert with annotations about the tunes. He also had wonderful stories about World War II, and how he rowed a boat to attend school.

The people who taught me: David the biker who told me much about Macbeth, the Picts, and the Brocken Spectre as we chatted in a parlor in Oban. The man from Trees for Life who explained the forests I was hiking through were alien trees, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, plantations that had replaced the Caledonian woods of oak and pine that Macbeth would have known. The woman at the Post in Burghead who told me to dip a cup from St. Aethan’s well, which would cure all my ills. Perhaps if I’d been a believer.

The new friends: Sunday at the Black Isle and I thought I’d walk to Fortrose and see the ruined cathedral. I was hungry but nothing was open except for the tiny Union Tavern. Annie offered me crisps or tomato soup heated up in the back, but as I turned to go, the lean man at the end of the bar said, “Have a drink with us, lass.” I spent the rest of the afternoon with Ollie and Hugh and the boys. Four of them went home for instruments and we had a real ceilidh. Can’t wait to stop in again when I return this fall. 

Robert/Inside Voices: Even with research, these people lived so long ago. How did you flesh out a story of historical characters so long after they walked the earth? 

People are people. They love and hate, compete for prizes and prestige, worry about their children’s future. Instead of an iPad, they gave their children wooden swords and spindle whorls, but the impulses are the same.

That said, it’s difficult not to run afoul of cultural expectations when you’re writing in this day and time, much less a thousand years ago. Much of my research was concerned with practical culture of the time. For instance, noble children were sent away to fosterage generally at 6 or 7. They remained with that foster family until around 17, when a boy was considered to be a man. How does that affect the parents’ bond, and the foster parents’, with the child – and vice versa? That’s a knotty problem for Macbeth, whose distant father is often at odds with the Alban king who fosters him and teaches him the arts of war and governance.

Jeffrey/Inside Voices: Without giving too much away, can you tell us about the conflict between Macbeth and Duncan?

Duncan and Macbeth were nearly the same age, grandsons of King Malcolm II by different mothers. Thorfinn the Great of Orkney was yet another cousin, and all three would have major roles to play in the political world of Northern Europe.

I put Duncan and Macbeth together as fosterlings raised at the Alban court. Duncan was about four years older, so you had the sibling rivalry of an older and younger child. Knowing what history said about King Duncan, that he made poor judgments when it came to invasions and battles, I decided that he would likely have been impetuous as a child, rash, even a bully. Macbeth we know to be literate and rather pious, so I invented the monk who instructed the two boys in theology and Latin and Greek--or tried to, in Duncan’s case. 

My novelistic choices, informed by the historical record, would spark conflicts throughout their teenage and young adult years. The heart of their disagreement was the method used to determine the royal succession. The Celtic tradition was for the “men of the blood” to meet and elect the most able from among their number. They might choose the man named by the king as his tanist or heir apparent, or they might not. Macbeth had the better claim to the throne, in terms of bloodlines, but supported Duncan militarily when he was named tanist and then elected king. However, Duncan was not a success on the battlefield. Hoping to get a win and improve his popularity, he made the fatal mistake of invading Macbeth’s home territory. 

I’ve called the next book The Last Highland King. After Macbeth, rulers were elevated under the principle of primogeniture, with Malcolm Canmore invading with English support to seize the crown he believed he was entitled to wear as Duncan’s eldest son. With his reign and those of succeeding Scottish rulers, political alliances and influences shifted toward England, and the Highlands past was supplanted by one centered on the Lowlands.

Robert/Inside Voices: This is the first of two books. What can you tell us about the next one?

I’m three-quarters of the way through the first draft of the second book. Much challenging territory ahead of me, however, as history records Macbeth’s pilgrimage to Rome, a foundling laid at his door, and a lot of battles. I’ve imagined Macbeth and Gruach in their married lives, especially the stresses caused by differing religious beliefs. The Last Highland King will be published in Spring 2027.