A Not So Great Read . . . So Far

I've been anticipating pulling this book off the shelf and diving into it for several years. I can't remember when or where I acquired it, but there it's been, staring me in the face every time I look at the British history section of my book collection. It looks so promising from the cover and from the basic sketch I have in my head of who Alfred was and all that he accomplished. (Google him for the basic bio.) So you can imagine my disappointment when, 20 to 30 pages in, I figured out that the author is using the book mostly to grind his academic axes, giving just a little useful history along the way.

OK, to be fair, the book is brimming with facts, but virtually every fact present is marshalled to support one of the author's pet theories. They sound like pretty decent theories; that's not the problem. The problem is that this book borders on unreadable for anyone not several years deep into both traditional and current (as of the early 1990s) Alfredian scholarship. Count me out on that score. It's sad to see this happening to history; I can personally testify to the damage this approach has brought to legal scholarship -- law review articles painstakingly researched, heavily edited by top law students, and published in paper and electronic form never to read by anyone except other law review article authors looking for a source to footnote. If the Smyth book is at all typical of history as written by the "professionals" in this area, then the handwriting is already on the wall for the history profession, albeit in a language indecipherable to the lay reader.

Maybe I'm not being fair. I'm only 150 pages into this 600-page tome. Maybe it gets better. And I do have a much better idea now of just how desparate Alfred's struggle against the Dane was, and how long it continued. Three wars spread over most of his 26-year reign. His the last Saxon kingdom in Britain not conquered by the Vikings invaders. Yet he held out, even after numerous defeats, with truly historic consequences for the England that the Normans snapped up nearly 200 years later in 1066. But all I learned in those 150 pages could have been covered in 30.

Or maybe my frustration is due to the utter lack of anything quotable. All I found in those 150 pages (dealing exclusively with Alfred's military career; later sections of the book that I will get to some day, maybe, cover Alfred's considerable scholarship and cultural pursuits) were these two things worth quoting:

"I cannot find anything better in man than that he know, and nothing worse than that he be ignorant."

--King Alfred's version of the Soliloquies of Augustine (frontispiece)

And this little gem that Smyth uses to contextualize Viking raiders' violence:

Too many modern commentators on viking culture appear to have overlooked the fact that ninth-centory Northmen were as yet unaware of the terms of the Geneva Convention.

--page 129.