The Steerswoman

Author
Rosemary Kirstein
Publisher
Rosemary Kirstein
Year
1989
Collection
Fiction
Series
Steerswoman Series
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Ask a steerswoman any question, and she will answer it truthfully and to the fullest of her knowledge. In return, you must answer any question she puts to you. If you refuse a steerswoman’s question, you will be banned by all steerswomen everywhere: they will never again answer even the most casual question you put to them. At the opening of this astonishingly good and smart novel, we meet Rowan, a steerswoman with a mission: to discover how a collection of strange gems with odd inlaid patterns were scattered all over the land. Unbeknownst to her, she has caught the attention of at least one of the wizards—a group of men all under ban, for their steadfast refusal to answer any questions about magic. There’s a lot of magic in the pages that follow, and not only from wizards: Kirstein’s attention to the world and Rowan’s journey within it tell one story about friendship and knowledge and identity, and another equally compelling story about our own relationship to technology—which is itself, perhaps, a kind of magic.

Reading notes

Undiscovered

One of the reasons we seem enamored with the early states, per James C. Scott’s excellent Against the Grain, is that they left records for us to read:

Thus if you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be “discovered” and to dominate the pages of ancient history. If, on the other hand, you built with wood, bamboo, or reeds, you were much less likely to appear in the archaeological record. And if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record.

Scott, Against the Grain, page 13

I think about this phenomena also with respect to the relative dearth of understanding of many pre-Christian “pagan” religions. (The word “pagan,” like its compatriot “barbarian,” was an insult.) Or indeed of women’s history in general, both before and after statehood. We have an unfortunate impulse to think that the history we can read is all the history there is—or all the history that matters. Which makes for some interesting questions about our current moment in time: what kind of marks will our digital and increasingly slippery present make in the archaeological record? What knowledge have we already lost?

Elsewhere, Scott does signal a more positive note:

But the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad...date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them. One might well argue, in fact, that such oral epics that survive by repeated performance and memorization constitute a far more democratic form of culture than texts that depend less on performance than on a small class of literate elites who can read them.

Scott, Against the Grain, page 216

This brings to mind Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. In the books, the steerswomen are literate travelers who wander the land, writing down all the things they learn. But when one of their number, Rowan, visits an annex where old logs are stored, she finds the books in disarray, with some missing and others imperiled by mold and bugs. Meanwhile, her outskirter (i.e., barbarian) friend, Bel, speaks often of the oral histories of her people, many of which contain wisdom and knowledge unknown to the steerswomen, and likely critical to the survival of both their peoples. Like the Greek epics, the outskirter’s histories are stories, told in verse and song, passed down by memory instead of pen. And maybe that’s a clue: perhaps a story well told can be trusted to outlast both paper and stone.