'The language of the Anglo-Saxons, long beloved by a succession of notable poets, has for the rest of us too often been afforded the status of a vulgar tongue. In Mark Atherton it has found a new and exciting champion. Atherton provides a rich geographical context that provides not only a sense of how the Anglo-Saxons thought of their local, closely observed, landscapes but also of how they conceived their place within a largely uncharted and perilous world. Over the whole book looms, rightly, the figure of King Alfred and his court to whom, even when all the legends have been dispelled, is undoubtedly owed the remarkable efflorescence of vernacular writings in later Anglo-Saxon England. Interspersed between chapters, the author has provided what he calls "Interludes", texts in Anglo-Saxon, with a translation in English and a short commentary. The selections are deeply illuminating, providing as they do an introduction both to the language and the "thought-world" of the Anglo-Saxon age, from the time of the migration until the reign of King Edgar and his second coronation at Bath in 973 - an occasion which, in Atherton's words, "marks the theological and political highpoint of the tenth century." Vulnerable though Edgar's kingdom was yet to prove, when faced with the returning Vikings of the eleventh century, its legacy nonetheless endured. The great corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature compiled during the reign provides an unrivalled testimony to the vitality of vernacular culture before the Conquest.

Mark Atherton's illumination of this culture and its roots is both arresting and enlightening. It deserves to attract a wide readership.'.