Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This was the first work that I ever read on Roman and post-Roman Britain: exciting and yet sensible. A spin-off from a particularly successful television series that remains both a curse and inspiration for every new programme on the Celts and the early medieval island.
I was interested to hear what you were saying about the crossover between history and legend – this must have been quite a problem for the author of the next book you’ve recommended, Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages. How do you research a book about the Dark Ages?
Well, this is the immortal problem. One of the greatest living Celticists is Professor Patrick Sims-Williams at Aberystwyth, and he says something that goes around and around in my head when I’m trying to write these books – that it is impossible to write a decent narrative without littering the page with ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’. This is always the difficulty.
One of the splendours of Michael Wood’s book is that he just concentrates on six or seven individuals from the Dark Ages, of whom we know something, and he concentrates on them. So he gets around the problem by standing on the few places in the bog of Dark Age history where he’s not sucked down, and I think that’s one of the challenges for any Dark Age historian – particularly a popular historian – to avoid these awful marshes and bogs.
He starts with Boudicca, which is a bit naughty because she’s not even really in the Dark Ages, and he moves all the way through to King Ethelstan in the 10th century, on the way discussing King Arthur. That’s perhaps the one dodgy part of that book, although he does it with style and panache. It’s just so difficult to say anything about Arthur and keep your feet on the ground.
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Simon Young is the author of four books and his writing has appeared in History Today, the Spectator, and the Guardian. He combines a commitment to serious history, especially that of the medieval Celts, with a desire to communicate Dark Age history to the general public. He lives in Florence.
