bookcloob reviews: shield maiden
3/7/26
feminism is when women can also be warriors. right? or: some thoughts on Shield Maiden, our latest bookclub book.
shield maiden
rating
3/10, which I feel is generous for a book we collectively did not finish
vibes
Fantasy-styled prose goes down fairly easy, if you don't wanna think about the problems with the plot. Good for people with an existing familiarity with the story of Beowulf.
thoughts
Shield Maiden is a retelling of the last major arc of the epic poem Beowulf, where an unnamed and exiled slave steals a goblet from a dragon's lair, waking the dragon which Beowulf must then fight. The book aims to tell the story of that unnamed slave: where he came from, how he came to be exiled, and how he ends up waking the dragon.
And yet the protagonist of the book is Freya, the daughter of the local lord, whose only desire in life is to become a shield maiden, a female warrior. When she is thirteen years old, she injures her hand and arm in a freak hunting accident, dashing those hopes, then we time-skip seven years to her being twenty. The rest of the plot seems to just... happen around her? She mostly gets involved by virtue of being the lord's daughter and therefore a target when the feast to celebrate King Beowulf's arrival devolves into political machination time. Her only other personality traits of note are her ~mysterious YA protagonist dragon powers~ and the fact that she's kind to the servants and slaves in her household.
As my friends pointed out, Freya seems like a weird choice of protagonist since she has been added to the original myth whole-cloth. The character of the slave— Theow, whose name literally means "slave" in a kinda heavy-handed way of handling the original character not having a name— is reduced to her love interest. Their relationship is kind of sweet, I guess, but Freya seems ignorant of just how much danger it puts Theow in. As a group we didn't read far enough into the book to confirm that this is the case, but we could see the inevitable "someone finds out and then Theow is exiled for it" twist from a mile away.
Issues with Freya herself aside, we also just found the billing of the book as a "feminist retelling" to kind of miss the mark. The titular shield maidens are nowhere to be seen; they are mentioned frequently but we never meet one as a character. Most of the other roles for women that we see are the standard cooks and healers and such. Freya's only viable options for her life path seem to be living as a lady of the house— subservient to her father and brother— or marrying off to another noble family. I would take less issue with the "feminist" branding if there was any indication of agency for women beyond the option of becoming warriors.
Similarly, I found there were several ~knowing looks at the camera~ of a sort where characters explained what the law says about womens' rights in a way that felt very forced and anachronistic. I actually DNF'd the book at one of these. I had kept reading past the book club meeting where we decided to stop, so I could confirm or deny if we were correct about where the book was going— but then I hit the part where Freya and Theow did get caught and Freya is told that she's being forced into marriage. Theow is all "the law of the land forbids this! No!" despite the fact that it was an earlier plot point that Freya was supposed to be married off but the contract fell through when her betrothed found out about her disability. At that point I was like Nope I Am Done.
For what it's worth, the book is decent to read if you don't dig into it too much. I thought the prose was nice, a sort of modernized version of the prose in myths and fairytales. The book is clearly something of a love letter to Beowulf (Sharon Emmerichs has a PhD in medieval and early modern literature and teaches Shakespeare as her primary job). I definitely think I would have gotten more out of it had I been more familiar with the original story; unfortunately, my only knowledge comes from reading excerpts of it my freshman year of high school, of which I remember very little. Maybe it's better in the second half also. I dunno, but I'm not eager to find out anytime soon.