Review : Athelstan

When I reviewed Marc Morris' excellent The Anglo-Saxons, I said I'd withhold from any comments about Athelstan until I completed Sarah Foot's book of the same name. Time to make good on my promise.

I'm going to start by saying that Athelstan is a hugely overlooked figure in British history. He easily ranks as the most powerful of all the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, bar none, and one of the greatest of British kings of any era. Noted for his piety and power even on the international stage, he brought his grandfather Alfred's achievement to its ultimate fruition : instead of saving his country from the Vikings, he advanced it against them. Outright conquering the whole of England, he subdued the Welsh and Scots (leading an army to the very northernmost fringes of Scotland) so that he has fair claim to be the first king of all Britain. This is not someone we should have forgotten about. Morris does an excellent job of describing Athelstan's achievements, so I was hoping Foot would give even more insight into this little-known but crucial figure from history.

She doesn't. I have to say that the book is just not very good. Foot begins well enough by saying she wants to write a biography more than a history, but she ends up doing neither. Virtually the entire book is ponderously swamped by an excess of tedious minutiae that conveys little historical information and absolutely no biographic detail whatever. The history of Athelstan is confined almost entirely to the first summary chapter, with all the rest of the book but the epilogue being largely pointless. The character of Athelstan is scarcely evident here at all.

Whereas Morris has a knack for recasting uncertainty into curiosity, Foot just comes across as pathologically indecisive. Instead of trying to present a flowing narrative of Athelstan's life, she considers every possible interpretation of every bit of unimportant evidence, committing to absolutely nothing on even the smallest detail. It's a truly torturous and frustrating experience for what should have been at the very least an intriguing read.

Now to my mind the right approach with writing a book on a subject about which little specific evidence survives is to present the general context : what is known from other sources about how Anglo-Saxon kings usually behaved, how they ran their court, how religion affected them, what life in general was like for their subjects. Where specific evidence is lacking, paint me a picture of the most likely version, make the uncertainty clear and we're all good. But Foot just doesn't do any of this.

Foot is not even any good at headings. In the chapter on "Family", the sub-section "Aunt" contains almost nothing about Athelstan's aunt at all. The chapter "Church" is concerned mainly with Athelstan's patronship of poets. And the entire chapter "Court" is basically a long list of places and dates, with nearly zero information on how the court was run. The best interpretation I can think of is that this is a scholarly tome, and if you're looking for a dry and lifeless list of primary and secondary sources about Athelstan, this might be suitable - as a popular history, it's a miserable failure. The whole book is a series of disconnected, tedious, inconclusive statements which... no. I just don't like it at all.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and there are some interesting details scattered throughout*. For example, that we find such clerks in Anglo-Saxon England as Israel the Grammarian : the name being biblical, not because of Jewish origins. Or how trading was allowed on Sundays - very much against my expectations, but relegated to a throwaway statement. And perhaps more importantly, how English was used as the official language of government, in marked contrast to the post-Norman era (I had assumed it would have been Latin). Foot even becomes dangerously risqué at one point, making an actual joke (!) about how Athelstan was "tough on theft, tough on the causes of theft".

* If I really wanted to, I am quite confident I could extract the best bits from this and Morris and produce a quite interesting 50 pages or so promotional pamphlet about how awesome Athelstan wasn't. Unfortunately I have no desire to read this book again in a hurry, so I won't.

There are two things from the book I find interesting, besides some minor details about how Athelstan was genuinely pious, concerned for the welfare of the poor, and formulated a rather cosmopolitan court. The first is Athelstan's use of poetry as propaganda instead of conventional prose descriptions. Foot speculates that even Beowulf might have been composed during this era, though since she doesn't give any quotations from the other poems, it's hard to see if this fits the style of the era or not. The whole thing is flavourless... she doesn't use the word "propaganda", but probably should have. There is however at least a quote from another scholar about how awful Anglo-Saxon rhetoric tended to be :

The object of the compilers of these charters was to express their meaning by the use of the greatest possible number of words and by the choice of the most grandiloquent, bombastic words that they could find. Every sentence is so overloaded by the heaping up of unnecessary words that the meaning is almost buried out of sight. The invocation with its appended clauses, opening with pompous and partly alliterative words, will proceed amongst a blaze of verbal fireworks throughout twenty lines of smallish type, and the pyrotechnic display will be maintained with equal magnificence throughout the whole charter, leaving the reader, dazzled by the glaze and blinded by the smoke, in a state of uncertainty as to the meaning of these frequently untranslatable and usually interminable sentences.

Well, gosh ! Sir, that is some commendable hyperbole about hyperbole right there. If only Foot herself could write like this, the book would be a masterpiece. And to be fair she does mention how the formulaic structure of the charters meant they could be rendered accessible to the commoners - that the high language intended for the elites could be circumvented by eventual clear statement as to what was supposed to happen. It's not that Foot doesn't have interesting source material to work with, it's just that she does a lousy job of curating that material - or even giving any quotes from the sources, so the reader could at least get a gist of things. Give me a few of these "interminable sentences", at least.

The second thing I do like about the book very much is the epilogue. Here Foot does a genuinely excellent job of describing the history of how Athelstan came to be forgotten. As late as the 18th century, he was still in the public consciousness as a great king from the heroic past. His decline was slow, with no clear single cause. But there are several factors. First there were allegations (likely erroneous) that he was illegitimate and murdered his brother to ascend the throne. Second he had no heirs, apparently a political choice in order to bolster his claims to kingship over multiple rival peoples. This meant he had no direct descendants with any motivation to sing his praises. Then, his achievements were quickly undone after his death, and his fixation on poetry rather than straightforward record-keeping may have limited the amount of biographic detail available for later scholars to draw on.

The biggest factor appears to have been a Victorian obsession with his grandfather, Alfred. By depicting him, completely wrongly, as the first king of Britain, Athelstan's main achievement was rendered impotent. As Alfred's star rose to the ludicrous height of being, "the most perfect character in history", so Athelstan's was doomed to sink into obscurity. This is a tragedy. Only here, at the end, does Foot's passion for her subject become evident. Elsewhere the miraculous survival of artifacts directly related to Athelstan elicits no emotion whatsoever, but it's clear that she truly wants Athelstan back in the public consciousness. It's just a shame that this book isn't going to be the one that does it.

Overall, I can't give this more than 2/10. There's interesting material in here, but it's arranged badly and described with all the enthusiasm of a dead moth. Maybe one day Athelstan will get a more deserving accolade, like his own movie, but I won't hold my breath.