Something from Nothing: A Historical World Without the History By Marie McCurdy

I always feel a pang of envy for historical fiction authors whose chosen setting is a time and place where people kept records.

Thusnelda, my heroine and the real wife of the rebel Arminius is mentioned about four times in the historical record. Total. That was the beginning of the research black hole I faced: early Germans had no written language.

First, I accepted that we don’t know much of anything. Archaeologists can identify a steel sword in a grave, but conclusions about why it’s in that grave are a guess based largely on biased assumptions. We have no idea why people were buried in certain ways with certain items, especially when it comes to cultures that left no written documentation behind.

Next, I evaluated the sources I did have. I read Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars to prepare for writing The Wolf Queen. He initially describes the Germanic tribes he encountered in shallow raids across the Rhine as raiders too lazy and violent to bother with farming. In a subsequent section, Caesar describes the extensive agricultural practices he observed across the region. This contradiction comes from the same book written by a man considered an otherwise trustworthy source.

For good or ill, archaeology flowered in the 19th century, when the majority of archaeologists were white Christian men who thought little of their own biases. Despite a preponderance of evidence that women have fought alongside men in battles around the world throughout human history, treating this evidence as a well-formed theory remains controversial.

The final step is building a historical world that works. Lacking a dearth of information about early Germans, I supplemented my research with both contemporaneous cultures (the Gauls and Celts to the west, the Scythians and Sarmatians to the east) and Viking cultures, despite the half-millennia at least between the two worlds.

From there, I used my best judgment to compile all these presumed facts, fair assumptions, and outright falsehoods into a world that was consistent and made logical sense.

Although it’s only three steps, this process proved extensive, and the result was the generation of a logical, believable, and, most importantly, real world.