Welcome to the final instalment of the Daggerspell Reread and Review Series!
If you’re interested in learning more about Kate, me or this project, please take some time to read ‘Introducing: The Daggerspell Reread and Review Series, with Kate Elliott’, where we discuss our experience with Kerr’s work (None for me! Lots for Kate!), and our expectations for this reread/review series.
The second part of the project, we tackled a large chunk of Daggerspell, which covered the first 184 pages, and saw the most recognizably ‘epic fantasy’ conflict so far: a war between armies, a battle between mages (good and evil), and a beautiful woman falling in love with a (sorta) prince. Sounds cliche, but, as we’re learning about Kerr, nothing she writes is ever so simple as it seems.
Though Cullyn, Jill and Nevyn are at the heart of the conflict in that section of the book, it was Lovyan, mother of Rhodry and Rhys, that caught our attention. Kate said:
Look how neatly Kerr introduces an older woman: She is a noblewoman who through a completely realistic twist in the law (explained clearly by Kerr) is a ruler in her own right although she is subordinate to her own son (who is gwerbret, which I will define here as a lord who is of lesser rank than the king but who has a number of lords under his rule).
Lovyan does not swing a sword. She rules. She rules over a collection of lesser lords (all landed) with a full understanding of the ways in which her situation gives her power and the ways in which she has to carefully negotiate her position because she is a woman.
[…]
Lovyan proves herself as a good ruler even while Kerr makes it clear that her being a woman makes her situation precarious. Nor is her role seen as a one note role. She is frustrated by her inability to reconcile her feuding sons (an issue that will become central to the plot later), she engages with Nevyn because she understands that he is far more than the simple herbman he pretends to be, she shows kindness to Jill. And she is a little secret in her past, an affair she obviously has had to keep hidden all these years.
She is an older woman with agency and a full personality in a genre that gives characters like her short shrift. She is absolutely one of my favorite characters in the entire series.
So, join us while we discuss the ending to Daggerspell, reflect on one of Lord of the Rings‘ greatest lessons… and twist ourselves into Celtic Knots as we look back on the entire experience!
