Warning: Opinionating in progress.

Lost Realms by Thomas Williams (William Collins, 2022) is a book with much to recommend it. The basic approach, ‘histories’ rather than ‘history’ is the only one that can deal with the ways in which Roman Britain became something else.

What intrigues me most is two aspects of William’s style. He can write very well; evoke the landscape of post Roman Britain; negotiate the tangle of evidence and contending theories that characterise the period in clear and unambiguous prose. But so much of the book relies on the reader not paying attention.

The following is a characteristic example of general style, and it illustrates two problems. The author is remembering climbing the steps to Tintagel as a child:

It felt endless that stairway-like the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. (p.146)

You could delete everything from the dash to the full stop and the information would be successfully conveyed:

It felt endless, that stairway.

It’s a common experience, especially for children. The author can rely on most readers  to understand his point (even if his intrusion of the memory into the narrative adds nothing especially relevant to the subject at hand). What follows the dash is superfluous in terms of information and is an attempt at ‘style’.

If this were a personal memoire of reading Tolkien, then the comparison would be at home if it were reversed. ‘When I read about the steps that ascended to the pass of Cirith Ungol from the Morgul Vale in Tolkien’s The Two Towers I remembered the steps that lead to Tintagel.’ p.146

 This would be the normal movement, illuminating the fictional by comparing it with a real, repeatable experience that is not unique to the individual. Williams consistently goes the opposite way, trying to explain the historical by comparing it to the fictional.

But what happens to the reader (me, for example) who has no idea what a Morgul Vale or Cirith Ungol are? That points to an underlying assumption, and an impossible one: the assumption that the reader shares the writer’s fictional knowledge and his attitudes. Williams’ range of references is eclectic: The Wicker Man, the Shining, Star Wars, the complete works of Tolkien. But no concession is being made to the reader. At one point rather than rewrite an unimportant but obviously obscure reference, he would rather add a footnote to explain his explanation.  

…that will embody an oddly retro-futuristic aesthetic, like the neo-Byzantine fantasies of the Trigon Empire…p.178

The overall impression is that the author is not making an effort to communicate, rather, he is putting on a performance, and the performance relies on the reader sharing his references, his fascination with his own memories, and his opinions. Which effectively means the Model Reader of this text can only be Thomas Williams.  

Sometimes this positioning is insidious: an anecdote will be introduced as ‘comic’ or ‘blackly comic’ rather than simply left to stand alone. Sometimes it’s unintentionally funny.

The story of Uther and Ygerna is, for modern readers, an uncomfortable read.

Stop. Which modern readers? All modern readers? Are we expected to believe that those who watched Vikings and Game of Thrones or any standard streaming service series are disturbed by this? Some modern readers? Students in universities who are told to feel uncomfortable?

But our author confesses:

I remember finding it troubling as a child and it stills leaves me feeling queasy. Not I think because the tale is in itself unusually unsettling (there are many, far more violent sentiments expressed in older Welsh and English poetry) but more for the horny relish with which Geoffrey tells it and the enormous appeal he clearly expected it to have for its intended audience…p146

I must admit I laughed aloud at this. The thought of Geoffrey writing 12th century erotica is almost as funny as thinking that what he wrote could have aroused your average clerical reader or titillated his ‘aristocratic’ listeners.  

Leaving aside the thought that horny relish sounds like a strange kind of novelty pickle, I wonder how many people reading this have read Geoffrey, or how recently or how carefully Williams has? If you’re reading this and have a copy of Geoffrey handy, stop now and read what Geoffrey wrote about Uther in Tintagel. It’s only a few lines. Does this sound like ‘horny relish’?  Then go back and read Vortigern’s meeting with Rowena, it’s not long either. Then remember what Geoffrey did when he wasn’t writing.

But most people won’t stop and read Geoffrey. They won’t wonder which readers are disturbed, or whether horny relish is an accurate description. It sounds good. It sticks in the memory. For many readers of this book, their only knowledge of Geoffrey will be that he wrote with Horny Relish. Like many recent ones, Lost Realms relies on the reader never stopping to consider what the words on the page mean. The glib references aren’t meant to be examined, or even given any thought. The author is entertaining himself and scattering his references with no real interest in ‘meaning’.

This might sound like I’m being over critical about trivial detail, but leads to a discussion of how the material is presented and understood 

Does style matter in non fictive texts?

I think it does. I may be wrong.

To restate the obvious, the period from the fifth through to the seventh century in Britain was very different to what preceded it and what followed. A well-known lack of evidence makes it a very dim age. But the institutions, social organisations, and assumptions of the Imperial world disappear (although not entirely), and what had replaced them by the eighth century (give or take) is only starting to emerge in this period.  

The difficulty of understanding the differences is compounded by the modern words we are forced to use to describe them. This is particularly true of those words related to social organisation and military activity.

But an historian compounds the problem when he or she starts to become enamoured of similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. The desire to explain by comparing the unfamiliar with the familiar is natural, but nothing is ever exactly like something else that isn’t itself. Often the differences are more important than the feeble similarities.   

Thomas has a habit of comparing something real (unknown and/or in the past) to something fictive. This seems to be a trend in publishing at present. It may reassure a certain type of reader that there is no substantial difference between Lord of the Rings and Anglo-Saxon history or Game of Thrones and the Wars of the Roses, but that’s an obvious lie. More significantly, precision is sacrificed for effect.

Stephen of Ripon presents Cædwalla’s visit to Wilfrid as one of student to teacher, the young prince ‘vowing that if Wilfrid would be his spiritual father and loyal helper he in turn would be an obedient son’, a Luke Skywalker to Wilfrid’s Master Yoda. […] What Stephen glosses over, however, is the manner in which the young West Saxon fugitive came to Sussex in the first place. As Bede tells it, Cædwalla swept south into Sussex with an army, killing King Æthelwealth and ‘wasting the province with slaughtering and plunder-rather more Darth Vader than young Jedi’. p. 319

[Due to a publisher’s proofreading error the final quotation, attributed to Bede, is completed after Jedi, not plunder as you’d expect.)

You could omit the words I’ve underlined and lose nothing. Not only does their presence add nothing, it distorts the material. If you were to stop and make a list of similarities and differences, which realistically no one ever does, then the similarities between Cædwalla and Wilfrid and Luke and Yoda, are so slight as to be meaningless. The differences, starting with one pair existed and the other is fictional, are great. What a King and a Holy man had to offer each other in this situation is not a one sided apprenticeship in a fantasy martial art, but an increase in the kind of power each is looking for: Wilfrid was no more disinterested in this than the king. Whatever the incident reveals about that particular contingent power relationship, is destroyed by the Star Wars reference.  

The desire for the sound grab works its way into the texture of sentences.  

The Northumbrian King found more than a thousand monks from Bancornaburg arrayed against him, all ready to deliver their weaponised prayers on behalf of the Britons-a sort of holy artillery deployed in the face of the pagan Northumbrian war machine. P278 

Delete everything after the dash? In English, writers should visualise their metaphors. What does the word ‘artillery’ evoke? Something big and loud and mechanised. The lead up to the Somme? The Germans shelling Verdun? Soldiers operating machinery, with lines of supply bringing up ammunition, or ammunition dumps.  

Now try imagining a group of monks as ‘artillery’? The image slides towards farce and trivialises the event.  

More insidious is the effect created by describing the Northumbrian army as a ‘war machine’. What do you think of when you consider the phrase ‘War Machine’? Machines of War? Tanks, Bombers, drones? Planes and tanks rolling inexorably off production lines; factories mass producing bombs; a society geared to war: recruiting offices, training, drill, marches.

How much, if any of that, applies to the Northumbrians? ‘Army’ is unavoidable, a convenient shorthand for ‘group of armed me’. Some of those armed men weren’t soldiers in either the Roman or the modern sense, they were farmers, and why they were there is unknown. They were probably armed with knife and spear, items of daily use. Did they have any ‘military training’? There would have been a smaller group of armed men who had better weapons, and perhaps training in their use.

How they organised their army, how many men it contained, how it fought a battle, how it was supplied, are all unknown, but it was a long way from the military organisation of Classical armies or any kind of production line. A loose modern term like ‘war machine’ simply destroys any possibility of getting at the truth of the matter.

This is not an isolated example.  

The so called Mercian supremacy was really an exercise in early Medieval gangsterism the Mercian king was an Offa you couldn’t refuse p. 287

The throwaway ‘so called’ implies the term ‘Mercian Supremacy’ is somehow suspect. Why? But in what way was the Mercian supremacy different to the Northumbrian? Groan at the ancient joke about Offa, and then ask why ‘gangsterism’ is a better term? A gangster is a criminal; which laws and whose laws were the Mercians breaking? If they were gangsters who were the police, or the upholders of law and order? How was Offa more a ‘gangster’ than Edwin? The nature of kingship in the early Anglo-Saxon period is difficult enough to discern, without the construct being hauled off in the wrong direction by a loose evocative modern label like ‘gangsterism’.   

I think style matters. I think the publishing desire to sell history by comparing it to fiction is as bad as comparing Malory’s Knights to Marvel Heroes. In Lost Realms the style detracts from the author’s ability to write accurately and clearly about his subject. His imagination is inspired by the thought of ruins and loss. But beyond the descriptions of fallen masonry and weeds there are people acting in the landscape, And they go missing due to his exuberant use of figures of speech and references to his favourite fictive texts.