Drawn to the Story: Researching and Writing About Macbeth

By Valerie Nieman

The true story of the Macbeths has haunted me for many years, through the writing and publishing of several other books, before Upon the Corner of the Moon became reality.

The infamous, murdering Macbeth first became part of my life when I found Tales from Shakespeare at home. Charles and Mary Lamb wrote the plays into prose, making them accessible even for a (too young) reader. There were other influences as well. My father quoting Shakespeare, especially, “I have lived long enough; my way of life/ Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf…”  from Act V. Prince Valiant comics in the Sunday paper. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, pulled from those same bookshelves at home; later, rescuing Hereward the Wake from a curbside junk pile.

When my father took me to see a touring production of Macbeth, it was my first encounter with professional theater. I was a pre-teen, and I remember the dramatic lighting, the ragged garments of the witches, and the fight scenes, but mostly the language. This was my first encounter with the Bard’s living, breathing poetry, and it would shape my entire life as a writer and poet and teacher. 

Upon the Corner of the Moon began when I was doing research for an earlier novel and learned that the historical figures were quite different from Shakespeare’s characters. Macbeth was a rightful king through the traditional Celtic system, ruled for 17 years, and was hailed in his own time as the “ruddy king of plenty” and “The Righteous.” I began reading widely and deeply into history, mythology, the Celtic Church, women’s spirituality, the politics of northern Europe in the age between the Viking incursions and the Norman Conquest. My bibliography, at least what I recorded, reaches to four single-spaced pages and does not include articles, TV documentaries, online sources, or the time I spent in Scotland to learn the lay of the land.

My research began with interlibrary loan books. (This was in the early 1990s.) I remember ordering an 18th century survey of the Province of Moray, thinking I would get a reproduction, but the brown paper package arrived from West Virginia University Libraries with an original volume! I was enthralled by the specificity of soils and stones, trees and crops, rivers and harbors, in the northeastern part of Scotland.

I would read many, many books, and then add internet sources. In recent years, I’ve benefited from newsletters such as Medievalists.net and online communities of interest including You Tube videos on Chronicle. Podcasts such as Bow and Blade and excellent documentary series such as Time Team, Scotland from the Air, Medieval Dead, and Secrets of the Dead have helped me expand my knowledge.

Every week, it seems, I read about new archeological finds and astonishing things that are coming to light — most recently, a matrilocal British tribe where men moved to the woman’s homeland rather than vice versa. Researchers used DNA to verify that unusual social pattern. My re-imagining of the Picts and the cultures that came before them draw a matrilineal line back to the Neolithic—why not matrilocal as well?

Finally, I made a trip to Scotland in 2014 and spent a month solo hiking—the Great Glen Way, the Moray Coast, Orkney, Iona, and more. I needed to see the land, the plants and animals. In my previous books set in Appalachia and North Carolina, I was able to draw on my life history, but Scotland was not part of my mental furniture, and I’d not want to write about a place unvisited.

Although little remains from my period, 1000-1050 AD—grass-covered ruins, Pictish symbol stones from early eras and standing stones from even earlier—I gained a sense of the landscape. Museums provided a glimpse into weapons and the materials of daily life. In 2024 I returned to wander in many more locations important to the book, while also spending time in the National Library and National Museum of Scotland.

To avoid the commonplace and the overused, I believe in thinking local! National museums and historic sites can be great resources, but don’t overlook the small local museums that hold treasures in their collections. I think particularly of what I saw at Elgin, Thurso, Arran, Abernethy, Rosemarkie. I also learned from people all along the way. Years as a journalist taught me to be curious and how to talk with people everywhere. I learned from a rewilding expert on the train that the forests I was seeing were not native but instead were plantations of North American trees, and how the ecosystem had been brutally reshaped by sheep-grazing and grouse and deer hunting. Casual conversations at the Post, the pub, in the parlors of B&Bs all added to my store of knowledge.

The challenge has been to see through the contemporary, whether in popular media or the sprawl of motorways and factories, to discern the outlines of the past. What used to be there? What traces remain? Through the palimpsest of the present, I’ve tried to glimpse the persistent past—trackways that predate the Romans, and then Rome’s famous roads. The parallel lines of “run and rig” agriculture cut deeply into the soil over millennia. The ruins of hillforts once fiercely defended, the howes and cairns become the home of legend, the silent stone circle. The past endures, and I’ve been fortunate to spend time visiting there as I looked for the historical Macbeths.

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Valerie Nieman’s debut historical novel, Upon the Corner of the Moon, is the story of the young Macbeths, destined to unite Scotland in the tumultuous 11th century. Books for Readers says, “Nieman has woven a masterful story with the attention to detail of a historian and the lyrical skill of a seasoned poet.” A second book, The Last Highland King, will appear in 2027. She is the author of a short fiction collection, three poetry books, and six other novels, including In the Lonely Backwater, winner of the 2022 Sir Walter Raleigh Award, which was called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy.”

Her novel Blood Clay won the Eric Hoffer Prize in General Fiction. To the Bones, a horror/Appalachian/ecojustice novel, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Now professor emerita of creative writing at NC Agricultural and Technical State University, she continues to teach at writers’ workshops.

Find out more about Valerie on her website https://www.valnieman.com/

Upon the Corner of the Moon: A Tale of the Macbeths (Book One of Alba)

At the dawn of the second millennium, two royal Scottish children are swept away from their families— Macbeth to the perilous royal court of his grandfather, and Gruach to the remnants of the goddess-worshiping Picts. Macbeth learns that blood bonds are easily severed while Gruach finds her path only to lose it when she’ s summoned back to the patriarchal world. Each struggle with gaining and losing power, guided and misguided by prophecy and politics as their paths converge in a fiery bid for royal succession.

Upon the Corner of the Moon separates literary legend from reality, immersing readers in a story about the real rulers who changed the face of Scotland. Some legends are true, and the truth sometimes becomes a legend— or a lie. This novel masterfully dovetails the Macbeth legend and the truth without sacrificing either.

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Category: On Writing