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King Alfred the Great
Soldier, statesman and scholar, Alfred the Great is celebrated as one of Britain's most successful and heroic kings. In this biography, Professor Smyth explores the life of a remarkable man. His conclusion is controversial: he argues that Asser's Life of Alfred, hitherto the most important source of our knowledge about Alfred, may have been a late medieval forgery. This revelation has profound implications for our understanding of the whole of Anglo-Saxon history.
770 pages, Hardcover
First published March 14, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 16, 2020
Well, this book was really quite something. It is MASSIVE, more than six hundred pages of small print, and it is hugely detailed. Smyth has an opinion on every single aspect not just of Alfred the Great's life, but of everything involving ninth-century Britain, and in each case he is going to give you a detailed, multi-pronged argument explaining why all the other historians are wrong and he is right. The book can be completely fascinating, and it can also be completely exhausting, and sometimes it is just completely tedious.
Smyth can be quite caustic when he takes up the arguments of other historians, which feels freewheeling and candid at first, but over time begins to just seem mean. It's worth noting that Smyth's central argument -- that Asser's Life, the biography of Alfred the Great supposedly written during his reign, was actually a forgery written some several dozen years later -- is decidedly a minority view among medieval historians. When you read Smyth's book, his theory certainly sounds plausible, and the other biographies I read of Alfred the Great* did strike me as a bit too credulous about the claims in Asser's Life, which no matter when it was written, was an obvious hagiography written for purposes of, for lack of a better word, propaganda. But I am not an expert in the period, and I am mindful of the fact that those who are experts largely believe Asser's Life was written by Asser when he said he wrote it.
If you want to know more about Alfred the Great, or about the ins and outs of medieval manuscripts and coins and charters, and you're willing to commit a good chunk of time, this book might be for you. But I wouldn't walk away from it too certain of Smyth's more controversial opinions.
* For reasons I cannot explain, when everyone else was making sourdough starters in quarantine I was developing an obsessive interest in Alfred the Great.
Smyth can be quite caustic when he takes up the arguments of other historians, which feels freewheeling and candid at first, but over time begins to just seem mean. It's worth noting that Smyth's central argument -- that Asser's Life, the biography of Alfred the Great supposedly written during his reign, was actually a forgery written some several dozen years later -- is decidedly a minority view among medieval historians. When you read Smyth's book, his theory certainly sounds plausible, and the other biographies I read of Alfred the Great* did strike me as a bit too credulous about the claims in Asser's Life, which no matter when it was written, was an obvious hagiography written for purposes of, for lack of a better word, propaganda. But I am not an expert in the period, and I am mindful of the fact that those who are experts largely believe Asser's Life was written by Asser when he said he wrote it.
If you want to know more about Alfred the Great, or about the ins and outs of medieval manuscripts and coins and charters, and you're willing to commit a good chunk of time, this book might be for you. But I wouldn't walk away from it too certain of Smyth's more controversial opinions.
* For reasons I cannot explain, when everyone else was making sourdough starters in quarantine I was developing an obsessive interest in Alfred the Great.
October 15, 2018
This was a slog. 600 pages of detailed textual analysis directed towards Smyth's theory (which I think he proved) that our principal source for details of the life of Alfred, Asir's Life, was in fact a forgery written over 100 years after Alfred died. Still what saves this from being a one star bore, is getting to look in on how historians of this period, where this is little traditional documentary evidence, work. In the end, the reader gets a fairly nuanced picture of the character of Alfred, if not the details of the events of his life which are lost forever.
February 7, 2013
The problem with Smyth's opinion of King Alfred the great is not that he is too critical. Admittedly he does dismantle previous ideas of Alfred learning to read late in life, Asser's authorship of the 'Life of Alfred', the presence of an international circle of scholars and Alfred's own spotless military record, but this is all rather justified. The actual problem with the book is that the author seems convinced that the previous theories on these subjects are so strong that he needs to refute every single point of them, and he goes about this in an incredibly long-winded way, adding up to over 600 pages! This makes the few parts of the book where he is being overly ambitious (ascribing authorship of the 'Life' based on "polysyllabic adverbs ending in -iter" springs to mind) really stand out as obvious. Also it makes trying to read this book from end to end really, really boring. Don't read this if you just want to know more about Alfred. On the bright side, this extensive research does touch on many other related subjects like the original composition of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. Three quotes to illustrate:
{on animal similes in Old English sources}
The early medieval Welsh—and indeed Celtic peoples generally—did not possess a monopoly on boar similes. The valour of the wild boar provided clichés for a wide variety of warrior societies throughout the Middle Ages. Boar-crested helmets are described in Beowulf and an actual specimen of just such a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon helmet from Benty Grange in Derbyshire may be seen in the Sheffield City Museum.233 When Geoffrey le Baker referred to Edward, the Black Prince, as ‘the boar of Cornwall (aper Cornubiensis)’ in his account of the campaign at Poitiers in 1356,234 was he also alluding to the valour of a Celtic boar? And when Geoffrey changed his metaphor a few lines further on, to describe how ‘the prince of Wales charged into the enemy with the wild courage of a lion’235 was he then abandoning his encoded Celtic imagery and moving on to some equally obscure alien motif? It is only when scholars have fallen prey to the Welshness of the Life of Alfred, that Celtic boars are seen to emerge from the undergrowth of its sub-text.
{The origin of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle}
when the Chronicle was first put together in 896–7, it consisted of a self-contained first proto-booklet covering the period from 60 bc down to 891–2. This was in every sense a closed book, put together by perhaps two or more compilers, and dealing with historical events of the remote and recent past. A second proto-booklet was begun simultaneously to serve as a chronicle of contemporary events which would be brought up to date from time to time and which of course formed a unity with the historical chronicle covering all that had gone before. This second proto-booklet began with the record of the Irishmen and the comet, by way of introduction to the account of Alfred’s Last War, and the last entries which were made while the king was still alive dealt with the summing up after the war in 896, the deaths of the king’s best thegns, and an account of the sea-battle in the Solent—all in that same year.
{Christianity and paganism – is Smyth being too gullible?}
Victorian naivety in the portrayal of the ‘noble savage’, combined with revisionist and post-Christian interpretations of ‘heathen integrity’ have done much to sanitize our view of pagan barbarism. An eleventh-century Irish account of conditions in a Danish war-camp after a victory over Norwegian rivals suggests a level of barbarism practised by one group of Northmen even against their own Scandinavian enemies, which accounts for the horror which viking marauders instilled into native populations in the Christian West. This account echoes Ibn Fadlan’s observations on tenth-century viking behaviour in the East: Now at this time, Maelsechlainn, king of Tara, sent ambassadors to the Danes. On their arrival, the Danes were cooking, and the supports of their cauldrons were heaps of bodies of the Norwegians, and one end of the spits on which the meat was hung was stuck into the bodies of the Norwegians, and the fire was burning the bodies, so that they belched forth from their stomachs the flesh and fat which they had eaten the night before. The ambassadors reproached the Danes with this [savage conduct]. The Danes replied: ‘This is the way they would like to have [had] us’.39 Those who rush to the defence of heathen vikings and who see them as ‘the long-haired tourists’ of the Early Middle Ages, who were given a bad press by narrow-minded monkish chroniclers who enjoyed a monopoly on reporting, do so in face of a formidable body of evidence centring on the ninth and tenth centuries which testifies to a relentless catalogue of treachery and cruelty ranging from Ireland and Spain in the West, to the banks of the Volga in the East.
{on animal similes in Old English sources}
The early medieval Welsh—and indeed Celtic peoples generally—did not possess a monopoly on boar similes. The valour of the wild boar provided clichés for a wide variety of warrior societies throughout the Middle Ages. Boar-crested helmets are described in Beowulf and an actual specimen of just such a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon helmet from Benty Grange in Derbyshire may be seen in the Sheffield City Museum.233 When Geoffrey le Baker referred to Edward, the Black Prince, as ‘the boar of Cornwall (aper Cornubiensis)’ in his account of the campaign at Poitiers in 1356,234 was he also alluding to the valour of a Celtic boar? And when Geoffrey changed his metaphor a few lines further on, to describe how ‘the prince of Wales charged into the enemy with the wild courage of a lion’235 was he then abandoning his encoded Celtic imagery and moving on to some equally obscure alien motif? It is only when scholars have fallen prey to the Welshness of the Life of Alfred, that Celtic boars are seen to emerge from the undergrowth of its sub-text.
{The origin of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle}
when the Chronicle was first put together in 896–7, it consisted of a self-contained first proto-booklet covering the period from 60 bc down to 891–2. This was in every sense a closed book, put together by perhaps two or more compilers, and dealing with historical events of the remote and recent past. A second proto-booklet was begun simultaneously to serve as a chronicle of contemporary events which would be brought up to date from time to time and which of course formed a unity with the historical chronicle covering all that had gone before. This second proto-booklet began with the record of the Irishmen and the comet, by way of introduction to the account of Alfred’s Last War, and the last entries which were made while the king was still alive dealt with the summing up after the war in 896, the deaths of the king’s best thegns, and an account of the sea-battle in the Solent—all in that same year.
{Christianity and paganism – is Smyth being too gullible?}
Victorian naivety in the portrayal of the ‘noble savage’, combined with revisionist and post-Christian interpretations of ‘heathen integrity’ have done much to sanitize our view of pagan barbarism. An eleventh-century Irish account of conditions in a Danish war-camp after a victory over Norwegian rivals suggests a level of barbarism practised by one group of Northmen even against their own Scandinavian enemies, which accounts for the horror which viking marauders instilled into native populations in the Christian West. This account echoes Ibn Fadlan’s observations on tenth-century viking behaviour in the East: Now at this time, Maelsechlainn, king of Tara, sent ambassadors to the Danes. On their arrival, the Danes were cooking, and the supports of their cauldrons were heaps of bodies of the Norwegians, and one end of the spits on which the meat was hung was stuck into the bodies of the Norwegians, and the fire was burning the bodies, so that they belched forth from their stomachs the flesh and fat which they had eaten the night before. The ambassadors reproached the Danes with this [savage conduct]. The Danes replied: ‘This is the way they would like to have [had] us’.39 Those who rush to the defence of heathen vikings and who see them as ‘the long-haired tourists’ of the Early Middle Ages, who were given a bad press by narrow-minded monkish chroniclers who enjoyed a monopoly on reporting, do so in face of a formidable body of evidence centring on the ninth and tenth centuries which testifies to a relentless catalogue of treachery and cruelty ranging from Ireland and Spain in the West, to the banks of the Volga in the East.
May 8, 2016
c1995: This book comes across as one of those that have taken nearly a lifetime to write. It is a heavy book - both figuratively and metaphorically and no doubt of immense interest to any one planning to base a book around this period. It seems that we don't really know the facts surrounding this era of history so reliance on some notoriously unreliable sources have been the fodder of most of the lasting tales. Prof Smyth has taken some of these urban myths to task and makes a lot of sense out of the tantalising bits and pieces that remain. It is not a particularly easy read and its certainly not one of those that you can read all at one go. Cautiously recommended to those budding writers within the normal crew. ' Asser's king is presented to us as a 'neurotic invalid' obsessed with his own painful and mysterious medical condition.' Sounds like an early record of IBS!
April 8, 2013
My feelings are mixed on this book. Cons: 1. Smyth's virulent opinions threaten to overwhelm his credibility. 2. The organization makes this book less of a biography and more a study of the life of Alfred and its critical assessments. Pro: 1. Smyth seems to know his arguments well. 2. Any controversy relating to Alfred will be surveyed (or vigorously dissected) in this work.
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January 16, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14359465
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14359465
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews