Lost Realms: Histories of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings

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The grave-fields and barrow-mounds of these shadowed lands give up the bodies of farmers, warlords and queens, a scattering of their names preserved on weathered stone and brittle parchment. Maybe the book is trying to do too many things other than simply tell the history of the small kingdoms that flourished in the years following the fifth century?

This is the world of Arthur and Urien, Bede and Taliesin; of the Picts and Britons and Saxon migration; of magic and war, myth and miracle. Essex (Essex and Middlesex) - East Saxon kings claimed descent from Seaxnot, rather than claiming Woden as most other Saxon kings. Often he can say little more than we don't know a lot but his presentation of the topography, local politics, cultural developments and the understanding of archaeological discoveries could not be bettered. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. I read until I was part way through the chapter on Essex before deciding that I really wasn’t enjoying the book sufficiently, and this wasn’t compensated by the learning.

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If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. The author manages to create something from almost nothing with really solid scholarship and layering over that with a poetic vision.

Perhaps I was expecting a history book and this a new hybrid historical genre where history and autobiography are mashed together and knowing Star Wars and Tolkein is more important than reading Geoffrey or Gildas. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). I say attempt because the whole point is the incredible paucity of evidence: a lot of kings and some kingdoms may not have existed at all. Some – like Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and Gwynedd – have come to dominate understandings of the centuries that followed the collapse of Roman rule. Found the fleeting references to some of the more successful kingdoms more interesting than the minor kingdoms that ultimately gave way.