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

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However, apparently it makes him queasy because of the 'Horny Relish' which which Geoffrey of Monmouth described the conception of King Arthur. In Lost Realms, Thomas Williams, bestselling author of Viking Britain, focuses on nine kingdoms representing every corner of the island of Britain.

If you are interested in Britain’s history from the Romans to the Vikings, then you will like this book. As such, a lot of the book is based on supposition, although he fully gets to grips with archaeological and literary sources from the era while admitting their shortcomings. They style is great too, very lively, with a couple of exceptionally good jokes including one that had me swearing and posting on Bluesky.

He worked as project curator for the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend (British Museum 2014) and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

After a stirring Prologue which sets the tone of the book, coming across as sceptical of recent revisionism and also somewhat romantic about the period, Williams sets out in an introductory chapter his process of choosing nine “little kingdoms”, lost realms, from the time in Britain between the withdrawal of the Roman Empire in about 410 until the Viking invasions that are the subject of an earlier book by Williams. ancient landscape to resurrect a lost past where lives were lived with as much vigour and joy as in any other age, where people fought and loved and toiled and suffered grief and disappointment just as cutting as our own. Though the author is a critic of Bede and Gildas as well, making me look at those authors differently and reading all the notes because of it which took some time. The less said about the little earnest cringe about the term Anglo-Saxon which forms a coda the better.

Drawing on Britain ’ s ancient landscape and bringing together new archaeological revelations with the few precious fragments of surviving written sources, Williams spectacularly rebuilds a lost past. Rather than trying to create a single narrative for the period between the 5th century and the 7th, Williams looks at individual 'kingdoms', revealing how change occurred experiences across the country. How do we construct the past, and why do we – like the people of early medieval Britain – revere it, often finding in the tales of those long-gone a curious sense of belonging? 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? Thomas Williams, to his credit, takes great care to make clear when he is making conjecture from the sources he used and so there are a lot of possiblys and probablys throughout.

Wasting nine pages of the chapter on Dumnonia on a summary of Geoffrey of Monmoth's utterly non historical story is as baffling as the author's desire to tell the reader that the story of Arthur's conception makes him 'queasy'. Actually rather beautifully written in its account of the people and realms that came and then disappeared from time leaving such fleeting and barely discernable remains.Williams has a fine command of the literary, administrative, religious and archaeological sources of early medieval Britain. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. The book is occasionally verbose, but what appeals is his poetic evocation of ruined landscapes mired in the forgotten past. There are so many times we have to say “maybe” or “perhaps” but that doesn’t make anything in this book less compelling.

He is also however a meticulous, honest and fair-minded scholar, and his careful analysis of that evidence, material and textual, always establishes its limitations as well as its potential. In riveting detail, Williams uses Britain’s ancient landscape to resurrect a lost past where lives were lived with as much vigour and joy as in any other age, where people fought and loved and toiled and suffered grief and disappointment just as cutting as our own. Sometimes a point was made then we went off on a few tangents only to either come back to the point way later or never mention it at all.They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. 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.