For most of the early Middle Ages, England was divided into a series of kingdoms ruled over by different houses. Over centuries these kingdoms were absorbed, conquered, and annexed to form the England we know today, with many of the details of the men who ruled them subsequently lost to history.

 

Pat of the challenge for anyone seeking to study the era is sorting through this collection of names so as to understand who ruled where and when. In this respect Timothy Venning's book is a useful tool. Dividing the era into a series of chronologically arranged chapters, he offers brief biographies in chronological order of the kings who ruled during that time, as well as a few of the most notable queens. The biographies themselves vary in length, with some only a paragraph long while others cover several pages. Together they provide a summary of the basic facts about the monarch's life and reign, with little in the way of analysis or context. While a handy volume, Venning provides little that is not already more easily available online. This may raise questions of utility for some, but for those who want a useful reference guide at hand Venning's book meets the need adequately.

As I move ahead with my little English monarchy biography reviewing project one of the things I'm doing is acquiring then necessary books for it. While most I hope to get through Inter-Library Loan, there are a few that, because of their obscurity or their appeal, I will need to purchase if I want to read them.

 

The first of these was Timothy Venning's book. This was one of the few books available about Anglo-Saxon kings that I could find in my researches, and I decided to get it to compliment Richard Humble's book. Fortunately it was pretty affordable — the total came to less than $15, including shipping — and today I opened my mailbox to discover that it had arrived.

 

And it took me ten seconds to discover that it wasn't a history of the Anglo-Saxon kings, but a biographical dictionary.

 

Now, biographical dictionaries can be incredibly useful tools, which is probably why they remain in print even in the age of Wikipedia. But for my goals it's useless, as it provides little beyond a very basic overview of each person.

 

In a way, I'm relieved, as it means I can cross one title off of my ever-expanding list of titles to read for the site. But it is annoying that I had to spend nearly $15 to discover this, as it feels like a waste of good money. I want to just return the book, but it feels a little unfair to the bookseller to do so, as it is in every other respect exactly what I wanted. I guess I'll take this as a handy reminder why I don't want to spend any more money than I have to in order to make this project possible,

A rather superficial military history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms/monarchs in England.  This book didn't provide much information on their culture or anything else, other than who invaded which kingdom, when and the atrocities committed.  While a fair number of colour photos and a few poor maps were included in this book, a time line and genealogy would have been helpful as well.  I'm hoping A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons: The Beginnings of the English Nation by  Geoffrey Hindley provides more information on the Anglo-Saxons other than their wars.

Fantastic book on the food and drink before the Conquest. Dense with details and lots of really original research. Piecing together what Anglo-Saxons ate is incredibly difficult. Dr.Banham puzzles out some good theories based on "feorm", or food rents (from the Domesday Book, Rectitudines singularum personaum, and Be gesceadwisan gerefan), from Aelfric's Colloquy, which was written ~1000AD to teach monastic pupils Latin, from the Monasteriales indica (the Old English sign language monks used when they had to keep silence), and the funeral feasts at Bury St. Edmunds. Medical texts that include recipes for food for invalid give a few more clues. Archeological evidence is priceless, as is linguistic evidence (like the Old English word for garden, lectun, which translates as "leek enclosure") and the occasional glimpses of food in illustrations, sculptures and paintings from the period.

This is a great resource. It's written clearly, in a style non-academics can easily understand, and there's a whole section of color photographs that show what 9th-11th century produce and livestock probably looked like, plus recreations of ovens, gardens, and a photo of one of the carbonised loaves of bread from the eleventh-century. I recommend this to anyone who loves Old English or history, or is just curious as to how we think about and prepare food has transformed over time.

Review by Michael D.C. Drout for The Medieval Review

Despite its seemingly hyper-specialized title, Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England is a book that should be read by all medievalists. Hall's conclusions about his subject are significant, but far more important is his methodological approach, which is a new model for early medieval scholarship. His demonstration of the ways that rock-solid philology can be combined with cross-cultural historical scholarship, folkloristic analysis of later material and some contemporary literary theory is far more deserving of the title
"New Philology" than any turn to manuscript studies and variants in
the 1980s ever was. Hall's exceedingly careful reconstruction of the
cultural categories in which 'ælf' existed shows how comparative philology can be extended to become comparative cultural studies. By
putting linguistic history into an anthropological framework and using
as comparanda folklore dating from as late as the seventeenth century, Hall is able to recover information about medieval cultures that would otherwise be lost forever. The genuine excitement of such recovery and the technical precision with which it is done are both inspiring.

Elves in Anglo-Saxon England is a linguistic and cultural history of the word 'ælf' and its shifting denotations and connotations from the pre-conversion period through the eleventh century. Hall demonstrates that there was both a fundamental continuity of beliefs about elves and significant change in the specifics of those beliefs. Early Anglo-Saxon elves were human-like (in opposition to other types of monsters and supernatural creatures). They were members of the in-group of humans in contrast to the out-group of monsters. Elves were dangerous only to those members of society who violated certain norms; unlike monsters, they did not threaten society as whole. However, as the Anglo-Saxon period went on, elves became more closely associated with demons and the devil 'ælf' is used as a synonym for Satanas in the circa-800 Royal Prayerbook).

Likewise, as the Anglo-Saxon period went on, elves moved from being
gendered masculine to being gendered feminine. By examining Anglo-
Saxon glosses for Latin words for nymphs, Hall shows that female elves
were not originally significant components of the Anglo-Saxon belief
system, but that elves became gendered female over time. He argues that the early Anglo-Saxon mythological system had male elves, who were effeminate, and female hægtessan, who were violent and martial. The word 'ælfscyne', applied to Abraham's wife Sarah in Genesis and to Judith in the poem of that name, is associated with dangerous feminine beauty, showing the carryover of some of those cultural categories into later, Christian culture. Ælfscyne is not inappropriate or a failure of tone in Christian contexts; it indicates dangerous, otherworldly feminine beauty, exactly what both Sarah and Judith had. The semantic evolution, then, moved from elves as otherworldly, to elves as otherworldly and effeminate, to elves as otherworldly and female.

Among his other contributions, Hall clears away significant critical
detritus, demonstrating conclusively that the idea of "elf-shot" as
being magical arrows shot by elves and causing illness is a complete
construction of scholars with no basis in medieval texts. When elves
inflicted illness, it was not through invisible arrows, but by ælfside and sidsa. Both words are cognate with Scandinavian "dirty magic" (to use Sarah Higley's phrase). Hall shows that the medical texts, at least in relation to ælf, evince a consistent rational system in their own terms (not in relation to contemporary, science-based medicine).

For all its significance, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England is not an easy book to read. Boydell's decision to print the book in very small, dense type is to be regretted, as are the stylistic infelicities caused by the work's genesis as a dissertation, which distract from the very valuable main argument. It has become fashionable among reviewers to complain about long, discursive footnotes. Would that the footnotes here were more discursive. Instead, they are too often a kind of dense-packed, unreadable list of sources; necessary, perhaps, to demonstrate to a dissertation committee that all the i's have been dotted and the t's crossed, but not helpful to the argument. Notes in a more narrative style would be more rhetorically effective.

More significantly, the book could perhaps have been reorganized. The
first few chapters, on the Scandinavian context of elves and on "early" Anglo-Saxon material (mostly Beowulf), very frequently refer to arguments that will be made later in the book. It may have been more rhetorically effective to put these arguments earlier so that the reader could judge them in context, particularly because they are on much more solid ground than arguments made about Beowulf, many of which are, by necessity, speculative or indeterminate. For example, Hall refers to the argument that "the wyrm in Beowulf was once the 'last survivor' who speaks in lines 2208-93" claiming that it has "regained a degree of favor" (60, n. 44). This is not at all a mainstream view in contemporary Beowulf criticism and, although not essential for Hall's
argument, its invocation is likely to be a distraction without much
more argument. Also problematic are some arguments about the assumed
early date of the poem (though I personally am in general agreement),
not necessarily in themselves, but because, rhetorically, they may
serve to push readers away from the argument before its effectiveness
is fully established.

I also must mention that the book has the distinction of including the
most baffling footnote I have ever encountered (page 54-55, note 1).
Hall concludes a long, detailed and linguistically rigorous note on
the etymology of ælf by noting that Lise Menn has suggested "that the root */alb^h/ is itself a loan from Sindarin alph ('swan'). This raises some intriguing possibilities." Because Sindarin is one of J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages, Hall cannot mean that an Indo-European word has been borrowed from it. I wonder if something has gone missing here in the editing or production process. It is worth noting that Tolkien, who had thought very deeply about the linguistic and mythological roots of Anglo-Saxon elves, came to some of the same conclusions as Hall, though he did not publish them in scholarly form but instead integrated them into his fiction. See Tom Shippey's "Light-elves, Dark-elves, and Others: Tolkien's Elvish Problem," Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 1-15.

But these are minor criticisms, more about effective rhetoric than
about scholarly accomplishment. On the latter grounds, Elves in
Anglo-Saxon England is an important achievement. Hall's demonstration of the continuing value of philology and his means of enriching his philological analysis are innovative and very welcome, and the book's specific conclusions about elves in Anglo-Saxon England are well founded. Most significantly, the book's methodology deserves both admiration and wide emulation.