markmann's review
4.0
Ed West’s narrative travels across seven centuries of early English history, from the Roman conquest to the rise of Alfred the Great, who launched the country on its path out of the Dark Ages. It’s true that the book covers the conflict between the Saxons and the Danes, but West takes a wandering path, often flitting from anecdote to anecdote. He makes up for this lack of momentum with wit and sarcasm, however, and the overall feeling of the book is a playful romp through an extremely violent and unpleasant period of history. This dissonance between the tone and the content kept me interested to the end, though admittedly I am glad it wasn’t a very long book.
eyan_birt's review
3.0
I struggled because as a summary the information presented was clear, but I was expecting a more academic tone I suppose. There were jokes and humor that I found funny, but sometimes dismissive. Comments about scholars not liking the term "Dark Ages" felt like West just doesn't understand medieval scholarship which, since he is not a scholar of the medieval period I don't expect him to. It was off putting, however, because it meant I couldn't trust some of the other humor for being academically "accurate" even though this is a recent publication.
peterseanesq's review
5.0
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R35HXFHCKC7A0N?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R35HXFHCKC7A0N?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
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.
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