Anyone who tries to write historical fiction about Anglo-Saxon royalty runs into a problem: that would be the names. Many Anglo-Saxon royal names look and sound strange to us today, even if we simplify the spelling. For example: Æthelred, Ecbert, Athelstan – each one seems a mouthful; that is, until you try to twist your tongue around something like Ælfthryth!

Anglo-Saxon royal genealogy

An even bigger problem, though, is that there was a tendency to re-use royal names. Without giving any thought to the headaches this would cause future historical novelists, Anglo-Saxon royalty named their sons and daughters after, well, Anglo-Saxon royalty, so names are repeated generation after generation.

In the time of King Æthelred II, one of the female names we come across again and again is Ælfgifu. The king’s first wife was Ælfgifu. One of his daughters was Ælfgifu. The daughter of one of his most influential ealdorman was Ælfgifu. And to add insult to injury, the king’s second wife, who had the perfectly good, easily pronounceable French name of Emma, was given, upon her marriage, the name Ælfgifu. The name is awkward enough for modern readers, but to have four Aelfgifus in a novel? It’s enough to make a novelist weep.

Still, I came up with ways of dealing with this avalanche of Ælfgifus. To begin with, the king’s first wife is dead when the novel opens. Just a quick mention early on and whew! One Ælfgifu down. The king’s daughter is just a child, so after inserting her full name for propriety’s sake, I switched to a shortened version and called her Ælfa. Two down.

Lady Godiva – rhymes with Elgiva. J.J.Lefebvre, 1890 (Wikimedia Commons)

When it came to the ealdorman’s daughter, I decided to use another form of the name, and so the third Ælfgifu became Elgiva. How does one pronounce it? It should rhyme with another, more familiar Anglo-Saxon name: Godiva. Did the Anglo-Saxons say it that way? Probably not, but I’m invoking Poetic License, which I keep close to hand here in my desk.

As for the fourth Ælfgifu, I decided that, in my novel, the king’s new wife would hang on to her French name. It’s true that granting her the name of a royal, Anglo-Saxon saint would have been a symbolic way of identifying her with her new family. (That shouldn’t seem strange to us – it’s done today. Elizabeth Bennett marries Mr. Darcy and becomes Elizabeth Darcy. Welcome to the family.) In documents of the time Emma’s name is sometimes written as Ælfgifu Emma, so Ælfgifu may have been a name used only formally. It’s possible that among her close friends and her family group, Emma remained Emma.

But why, you may ask, was the name Ælfgifu so popular in Æthelred’s reign?

Queen Elgiva by Joanna Boyce, pre-Raphaelite artist. 1855. (Wikimedia Commons)

The answer: it was because of Æthelred’s grandmother, Saint Ælfgifu, also known as Saint Elgiva of Shaftesbury. And guess what? Today, May 18, is her feast day.

She was the first wife of Æthelred’s grandfather, King Edmund (and there’s another one of those repeating royal names). She gave birth to two sons: Eadwig who would one day marry a lovely girl named Ælfgifu (stop already!); and Edgar who married – oh dear, let’s not even go there. After the birth of her sons, this Queen Ælfgifu decided to leave the hectic life of the court for the more sheltered life of a nun. Okay, probably she was dismissed/set aside/ retired – a political liability perhaps. Her husband, King Edmund, remarried, although his second wife had no children. It was St. Ælfgifu’s sons who would eventually rule in England.

As a queen St. Ælfgifu was known for redeeming condemned men, for clothing the poor, and for giving property to the abbey at Shaftesbury. She must have been popular there. As a nun, she suffered stoically from ill health. She died in A.D. 944, two years before her ex-husband, the king, would be stabbed to death at a place called Pucklechurch.

And so today we honor St. Ælfgifu, or Elgiva, if you prefer. She does not appear in Shadow on the Crown. Oh no. If you have read the book, you will know that the Elgiva I have created for my novel may be many things, but saint is not one of them.

A writer of historical fiction has to endure numerous hardships as she conducts intense research into the period she is hoping to re-create in her book. Surely you know this. My own hardships, for example, included a glorious day of hawking in Northamptonshire, a day spent wandering, captivated, through the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark and, oh yes, there were those rigorous hours I spent at Rabbit’s Foot Meadery in Sunnyvale, pestering the owners with questions about mead, and sipping from a glass of liquid gold.

Michael & Maria Faul

Maria and Michael Faul are the owners of Rabbit’s Foot Meadery, and Michael’s own Viking roots can be discerned in his Irish accent as he stands beside the counter of his pub-like tasting room and waxes eloquent about the ancient process of making honey wine. His knowledge of mead and its production throughout history is obvious as he compares the methods of the ancients to the one he’s developed over seventeen years as mead master at Rabbit’s Foot.

“In medieval times they would have taken water and honey and boiled it. There would have been lots of things in the honey – bits of bees and wax – that would rise to the top and get skimmed off. I don’t have to worry about that because either our modern honeys are settled or the mead is filtered after fermentation. My process is to just blend the honey and water, and warm it up enough to dissolve it. If you boil it you’re going to lose some of the aromatic quality of the pure honey.”

Modern mead makers, Michael explains, are now using varietal honeys like orange blossom, sage, star thistle, raspberry, or blackberry. The flower or fruit will have a specific floral aroma that doesn’t necessarily carry through in the taste, but will give the mead the fragrance of the nectar source.

“So we use very specific honeys in all the meads we make, to keep that floral characteristic in the product.”

There is more associated with mead, though, than taste, aroma and alcohol content. In early England and Scandinavia the meadhall represented an indoor world of shelter and comradeship that was a sharp contrast to the outside world of danger and exile. The tasting room of Rabbit’s Foot Meadery conveys a similar sense of warmth and conviviality. Granted, a crossbow hangs on the wall, but it’s a mere decoration.

The folks at the tasting counter are far less fearsome than medieval warriors. Drawn here by postings on Yelp or Facebook, they might be employees of the garage door company down the street, or the nearby offices of Google, Apple or Yahoo; or they might drive up in a UPS truck. And yes, occasionally there will be a Viking or two.

“Once a month,” says Michael, “Kelly, one of the guys who works for us and is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, hosts a sword fighting tournament out in the alleyway. They’ve done it now for something like two hundred months in a row – the longest running individual tournament in the history of the SCA.”

Behind the tasting room with its Celtic flags and display bottles of mead from around the world is the 5000 square foot chamber where the mead is fermented year round. In 2011 the meadery used fifteen tons of honey to make several different products that are all, technically, mead.  But not all mead is the same.

Michael explains. “You’ve got honey wine: water and honey injected with yeast and fermented, and everybody thinks it’s going to be super sweet, but it can be anything from bone dry all the way up to dessert sweet.” The sweetness of the mead will depend on the proportion of honey to water and the point at which fermentation is stopped. “When I started doing this I might have had maybe fifty batches of mead going in little five-gallon buckets, testing different versions of honey, different versions of yeast, finding out which one came out the best.”

Now he has settled on a specific process, but he also has individual meads as well, each one made with a different honey and a different yeast designed specifically for that type of mead. And there are many types of mead.

“Add some apples to it and it’s a cyser; put berries in it and it’s a melomel; add cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, nutmeg and other spices and it becomes a methaglin; add pears and it’s a perry; add grapes and it’s a pyment. These are all medieval and early Renaissance terms for different styles of mead.”

If a visitor is lucky, Maria might be pouring tastings from a bottle of the Mead of Poetry – aged eleven years and 18% alcohol by volume, or from the Chocolate Raspberry Love – a port made for the Renaissance Faire that tastes like a Godiva chocolate with a kick.

Then there are the braggots, which are beers brewed with honey, making them also a variant of mead. At Rabbit’s Foot up to a quarter of the fermentable sugar in their beer is honey, and their very popular braggots and hard ciders are distributed under their Red Branch label.

In the tasting room, the Hard Black Cherry Cider is, hands down, the most popular libation with the clientele, followed closely by the traditional sweet mead and the raspberry mead. Often the room is crowded, frequently with regulars who have their own mugs hanging on the wall.

“We’re bursting at the seams here now,” Michael says, although the meadery’s growth has been a long, organic one. “We might have only ten people in here one day, but fifty on another.”

So it’s time to move into a bigger space, far from the Sunnyvale industrial park where the meadery is located now. The Fauls own fifty acres in the Sierra Foothills and they hope to break ground this year on a Viking Long Hall where they will produce and serve the ambrosia that the Vikings loved. They expect to keep a small warehouse and tasting room in Sunnyvale, but the new location will allow plenty of elbow room for those lifting a glass.

I expect that one day I will have to visit that Viking Long Hall, since I have another historical novel in the works. After all, it’s research. Meantime, I have my own little stash of Rabbit’s Foot Mead on hand for those moments when I need, you know, inspiration.www.rabbitsfootmeadery.com