Interview with Sally O’Reilly by Freya Bennett
Sally O’Reilly’s new novel, Hagtale, reimagines Macbeth through the eyes of a witch and a medieval monk, weaving together dark fairy-tale magic, historical intrigue, and a profound connection to the natural world. In this conversation, she shares how the book emerged from her fascination with stories that explore power, nature, and the perspectives we rarely hear, how she balanced rigorous historical research with imaginative world-building, and the authors and ideas that shaped the unforgettable characters of Wulva and Brother Rowan.
Hi Sally, congratulations on your amazing book, Hagtale, how are you feeling now it’s out in the world?
Thank you so much! It is wonderful to see Hagtale out there, in bookshops, and to talk to readers and see their responses. The book is really close to my heart, and I had been mulling over the ideas in it for some time.
What inspired you to retell Macbeth from the perspective of a witch and a medieval monk?
I have always loved the play Macbeth for its darkness and magic, and I am also interested in ways that stories can address climate change and the destruction of nature. Hagtale brings the two ideas together – the witches are the guardians of nature who want to wreak destruction on the Thanes – the men who run the show – before these men destroy nature.
But I didn’t want this to be an anti-male book, and Brother Rowan, kindly and a lover of his garden, demonstrates that there aren’t simple black-and-white answers to these existential problems. The two points of view also represent different ways of telling a story – the written version (Rowan) and the spoken version (Wulva).
How did you balance historical research with imagination when creating the world of eleventh‑century Scotland?
I certainly did a lot of historical research, largely around Scottish history and mythology, traditions in witchcraft and medieval monasteries and worship more generally – the eleventh and fourteenth century world view. But I also did a lot of research into the natural world, the habits of wolves, what characterises an ancient forest and so on. I think the fact that Macbeth itself seems mythic and like a dark fairy tale helped release me from a feeling that I had to be ‘faithful to the facts’.
The distance in time and the fact that Shakespeare had done plenty of inventing in his play seemed to clear the way for me. I wrote the first draft relatively quickly and really let my imagination rip, trying to be as extreme as I dared, particularly in the Wulva scenes where she is living with witches and has been brought up by wolves.
I also used my own observations of the natural world to inform the nature writing, and spent time in Scotland in the areas where Macbeth lived. Nairn is one place that blew my mind – the beach there seems endless, completely otherworldly.
The theme of “who owns a story” is central in Hagtale — what does that idea mean to you personally as a storyteller?
Yes, this is a subject that I’m drawn to. It fascinates me that the historical versions of events that we have inherited are so flawed and incomplete. There is a great Hilary Mantel quote about how little remains in the sieve for us to investigate when trying to understand the past. The idea of oral and lost history is so beguiling, those versions and perspectives we just never got to hear. And of course we are often talking about the women’s version, or the version of indigenous peoples. What we have is what was written, and what has survived, and that both inspires my imagination and makes me wonder what we have thrown away.
Do you approach writing differently when working on historical fiction compared to contemporary novels?
Essentially, it is the same process. Idea, information gathering, mad first draft, then a gradual process of honing, sorting, rewriting, and then a better draft. Then the proper editing starts, the part I enjoy the most. But historical fiction has the extra layer of getting a fix on the new period and trying to do a crash course in its most important elements – I think that adds on about a year of additional reading, for me. I am not a historian, and for some reason every time I have an idea it is set in a new period. The book I am working on now is counterfactual, what I call mock Tudor, but even that means finding out a ton of stuff about what really happened in order to write my parallel world.
Were there particular myths, historical sources, or authors that influenced the characters of Wulva and Brother Rowan?
The key influence for Wulva is an amazing British writer called Charles Foster, who has written a book called Being a Beast. He is interested in the natural world in a radical and original way, and writes a lot about shamanism and how we used to understand the natural world intuitively and through our senses. For this book, he attempted to immerse himself in what you might call the lived experience of an otter, a fox, a badger and a swift. This all fed into the way I imagined Wulva. And I was also inspired by Angela Carter’s morphing of fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber. Wulva as Lady Macbeth is definitely inspired by Carter’s wild women.
Brother Rowan is inspired by William Golding’s The Spire, about the building of a medieval cathedral, and also by James Meek’s To Calais, in Ordinary Time, which evokes the fourteenth century and the Black Death brilliantly. There is a little bit of Bilbo Baggins in him too, in that he is reluctant to set out on his quest and is braver than he realises.
