The Raven Scholar
The Raven Scholar
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Antonia Hodgson on The Raven Scholar
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Coming home by a long way roundHodgson spent five years writing an unpublished gothic vampire fantasy before pivoting to four historical crime novels set in 1720s London. When the fourth Thomas Hawkins book was finished in 2019, she reframed the whole arc of her career not as a genre switch but as a correction of course.
it’s more that I stumbled out of fantasy into historical crime. I very much enjoyed the journey, I should say, but I’m happy to be home.
Returning to fantasy with a blank slate after years of archive-driven historical fiction, she chose a method that matched her instinct for following curiosity rather than committing to a premise in advance.
I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
What jumped out was a book on animal symbolism in embroidery and visual arts. That single volume pulled the map, then the history, then the whole structure of Orrun, the world of The Raven Scholar, behind it.
The question she kept asking once the animal-symbolism book caught her eye was not cosmetic. It drove directly into social architecture: who holds power in a world shaped by guardian animals, and how do those animals organize human beings into factions and monasteries and hierarchies.
I had the idea of a world where there’d been millennia of tyranny and how a society tried to prevent that, and had sort of successfully done it, but with compromises. So we’re in this world that is kind of half in, half out of tyranny, and where there’s always the potential threat of falling back into it.
How she wrote it
Four years, a raven named Bran, and invented primary sourcesShe started writing in early March 2020, at the beginning of the UK’s first lockdown, and spent almost four years on the book. Before a word of prose went down, she worked through a research-and-planning phase she describes through the book’s own symbolism, calling it the raven phase.
Before I write a word, I read around the subject, fill notebooks with research, draw maps, create detailed biographies of characters, etc. At some point, I usually put together chapter breakdowns—and sometimes I write these out and put them on my wall, even though I know I won’t stick to them. Then I start to write.
Partway through the first draft, she decided that reading about ravens and watching footage was not enough. She arranged a morning with Lloyd Buck, a bird trainer who has worked with David Attenborough, and Buck’s raven Bran. The notes she scribbled immediately afterward record what physical proximity gave her that no book could.
Both solid but light on the arm, constant moving/observing. When frustrated, tugs bits of grass out of ground. Can tell when he’s pleased with himself. Makes aark sound when irritated. Those last three also apply to me, come to think of it.
Because the world of Orrun is invented rather than historical, she had no primary sources to cite. Her solution was to fabricate them: an entire shadow library of plays, poems, folk tales, and paintings that mostly stay off the page but give the world its texture. The thinking behind that method came directly from her years working with genuine archival material.
having drawn from primary sources for my historical novels, I enjoyed inventing sources this time around: plays, poems, myths, historical figures, folk tales, paintings. Most are only alluded to within the story, but they give an added depth to the world. I think even the bits you eventually erase from the manuscript still have a ghost presence.
The hardest structural problem was fitting a genuine murder mystery inside an epic fantasy without the two modes undercutting each other. Her answer was not a plot device but a character principle, one she returned to every time the genres seemed to pull in opposite directions.
I spent quite a lot of time thinking, ‘Well, I don’t want that awful thing where you enjoy one bit more than the other, and you’re kind of annoyed when you’re pushed from one place to another.’ So really that came back down to character for me, because I always feel like once you’ve got the characters and you understand what their goals are, what their motivations are, what their history has been, then everything sort of slots into place.
She described to the Writer’s Routine Podcast the ratio of research to prose that she aims for, and it applies especially to an invented world where the temptation is to deploy everything learned rather than hold most of it in reserve.
you need a deep well of research but you only need to draw up a thimbleful...and people will still be aware of that well beneath because it gives you the choices. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
A society half out of tyranny’s shadowThe succession competition at the center of The Raven Scholar, in which candidates from different guardian-animal factions compete for rulership of Orrun, looks like a meritocratic solution to the problem of inherited power. Hodgson is precise about why it isn’t quite that, and why the book is interested in the gap between the system’s design and its results.
I think the Raven thinks it’s reliable...But you have to listen carefully, because in animal symbolism and mythology, one of the things that ravens are known for is that they’re considered tricksters.
The Raven Scholar follows Neema, a scholar whose guardian animal is the raven, as she investigates a murder during the succession trials. But the book’s moral weight rests on a compromised choice Neema made earlier in her life, one that funded her rise. Hodgson structured the trilogy to let the consequences of that choice play out across three books, because book one alone cannot hold all of what Neema and her rival Ruko have done.
you do have to kind of get to know Yana a little bit to understand everything else, especially what Ruko and Neema have done. They’re both characters who have done something really, really…um, unethical, shall we say? But then they’ve both benefited from it as well. How do you recover from that, from making those choices?
What she wants us to sit with
People who surprise you, and power that doesn’t announce itselfThe succession competition in the novel requires candidates to win a series of trials, but Hodgson is clear that this surface drama is a container for something less legible: the way accumulated wealth and inherited advantage quietly determine outcomes before any trial begins.
It’s about wealth, and long carried over wealth and how those people...things are stacked in their favor. So the game of power...isn’t as simple as winning a tournament.
The murder mystery asks Neema to read every person she meets, and the world of Orrun is full of characters whose guardian-animal faction seems to tell you exactly who they are. What Hodgson wants readers to carry away from the book is the experience of being wrong about that, repeatedly and in both directions.
Some of the themes of the book are about, you know, do you really know someone? Are they what they appear to be? And sometimes they’re actually better than they appear to be. They don’t all turn out to be, you know, disastrous monsters. Some of them actually kind of surprise you.