ÆLFRED’S BRITAIN IS INTENDED AS A COMPANION volume to my previous Early Medieval histories, The King in the North and In the Land of Giants. Many of the themes, people and places encountered here refer back, one way or another, to those two books. I leave the reader to make the connections.
The word ‘Viking’ is problematic, and much has been written about its origins, meanings and familiarity to those who found themselves on the wrong end of a Scandinavian raid. Suffice it to say that it is safe to think of ‘viking’ as an activity: hence, to ‘go a-Viking’. It should carry no particular ethnic or national badge—although, inevitably, it is frequently used as a convenient shorthand for a raider of Scandinavian origin. I have tried to avoid using it as an ethnic label.
A few words are required on spelling and pronunciation. I have tried as far as possible to render spellings in their original language for the sake of authenticity. In Old English, readers will come across letters like the ligature or grapheme Æ, or æ, which should be pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘hat’ (it comes from the runic letter called æsc, or ash, after the tree with which it was associated in the runic alphabet). Less familiar, perhaps, is the thorn, written þ and pronounced with a soft ‘th’, as in ‘think’. The eth symbol ð is a harder ‘th’ sound, as in ‘that’, and appears as Ð when it occurs at the beginning of a word. Anglo-Saxon spelling was itself inconsistent, and it is generally modernized by scholars and translators. Where I have quoted from their work, I have kept their rendering.
Old Norse has its own distinct accents and conventions. Most notably, names like Rögnvaldr have a final ‘r’ which is silent, and entirely absent in the possessive. So: Rögnvaldr, but Rögnvald’s. In Old Irish his name is rendered Ragnall; in the Latin of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto he is Regenwaldus.
The derivations of place-name forms and meanings are overwhelmingly taken from Victor Watt’s magnificent Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names. All quotations from translations of the original sources are most gratefully acknowledged. To have almost all of our Early Medieval sources in fine, accessible translations is a monumental scholarly achievement. Two outstanding resources, without which the modern researcher would be stranded, are worth mentioning: the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), a searchable database of all the recorded inhabitants of England up until the eleventh century; and the Electronic Sawyer, an online database of surviving charters from the Anglo-Saxon period.1
The Viking travel maps started as an aide-memoire to understand how Scandinavians were able to penetrate the remote corners of the island of Britain so effectively, and why it was so hard to stop them. The two versions, early and late, have proved helpful to me; I hope they are equally useful to the reader in making sense of this half-familiar, half-exotic world.