Saxons vs. Vikings

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This is not a serious work of scholarship, but it isn't meant to be. Ed West surveys the history of England from the Roman to Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, in a quippy, jocular style. The sources he cites are generally secondary sources, and he doesn't spare the effort to include a couple of humorous observations in every paragraph. Nonetheless, for all that, this book is a good survey of the subject and the humor provides a way of remembering the various interesting factoids that make up this book.

I am a kind of word nerd, so I find things like this captivating:

“The Britons called the invaders the Saesneg, as the English are today called by their neighbors to the west (in Scottish Gaelic it is Sassenach and in Cornish Sowsnek). They in turn referred to the natives as Welsh, which has a variety of meanings but none of them particularly positive, either “slave,” “foreigner” or “dark stranger” (likewise the French-speaking Belgians are called Walloons and Wallachia in Romania has the same etymology, while Cornwall, Walsall, and Walthamstow in London probably all come from Wal). The Welsh, or Cymraeg, referred to the neighboring country as “Lloegyr,” literally “the lost lands.””

Wales, Walloons, Wallachia....I never suspected there was a connection.

Another one:

“Some hangovers from pagan times still exist today: The “Boar's Head Carol,” sung every year at Queen's College, Oxford by a procession carrying a boar's head, almost certainly dates back to an early Anglo-Saxon offering to Freyja.”

And another one that gives a taste of the author's writing style:

“And yet not only is his great battle forgotten but the first king of England is largely unknown; his anniversary was barely noted in 1939, although in fairness we had other things to worry about, and if you asked the average person today what they thought of Athelstan, they'd probably guess it was some godforsaken place in central Asia. This “roof tree of honour of the western world” was famous in the medieval period and was even mentioned in Shakespeare, and it was only from the sixteenth century that Athelstan became increasingly forgotten, as his grandfather became more famous. Perhaps it was because Alfred's narrative of having our backs against the wall is more attractive than Athelstan's story of cementing the legacy, or that Alfred had commissioned a biographer to record his great achievements, and that a series of attractive stories about him fired the imagination. There was, according to some sources, a biography of Athelstan written during his lifetime but it was lost.”

All in all, this makes a satisfying and fun read for the history buff.