Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in 11th Century England |
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Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in 11th Century England
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by Harriet O'Brien
Sales Rank: 150976
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List Price: $24.95
$19.96
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 288 pages
Published by: Bloomsbury USA July 28, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1582345961
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1582345963
Book Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
While much remains unknown about Queen Emma as an individual, her story offers a fascinating entrance into the tumultuous world of late Anglo-Saxon England. Daughter of the duke of Normandy, descended just a few generations from Viking invaders, Emma (985–1062) was the wife of two kings (the English Aethelred and, later, his Danish Viking successor, Cnut), the mother of two kings and great-aunt of the Norman William the Conqueror. Despite her secondary status as a woman, Emma can be seen as a key factor in this momentous transitional period, serving as a source of stability and continuity in uncertain times. London-based journalist O'Brien provides a lively account of the harsh realities of war and politics in this era, the vagaries of political marriage and the thin line between invaders and settlers. She looks at without condescension the competing values of Christian and pagan custom. Unnecessary excursions into the present tense—mostly at the beginning of chapters—mar the tone of the narrative, which is otherwise nicely ironic about its self-serving and conflicting sources. These sources cannot definitively reveal whether Emma made her choices as a wife, mother and political actor out of calculation or necessity, but she was a lady who clearly took what fortune offered and built the best life she could from it. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
A lively portrait of a tumultuous period replete with conflict and strife, political intrigue and shifting alliances, assassinations and coronations.
Emma, one of England's most remarkable queens, made her mark on a nation beset by Viking raiders at the end of the Dark Ages, a period often neglected by conventional history. At the center of a triangle of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans all jostling for control of England, Emma was a political pawn who became a power broker and an unscrupulous manipulator. By birth a Norman, Emma spent the majority of her life on English soil. She was married to two kings of England and outlived both; she was twice driven into exile; while mourning the untimely loss of one son, she was devastated by the murder of another; she saw two of her sons crowned; she was stripped of her powers when her eldest son became king; and she eventually retired from public life as a dowager queen whose land and wealth had been restored. Regarded by her contemporaries as a generous Christian patron, a regent admired by her subjects, and a Machiavellian mother, Emma was, above all, a survivor: hers was a life marked by dramatic reversals of fortune.
Reader Reviews
Many people these days believe that the history of England began in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. This book shows that there was a thriving society on that island for years before that event. Rather than see that time as a Dark Age, this book retells the history of a land and a culture that was subsumed after the Conquest. We get the stories of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, the Danish rulers, and the intermarriage with the Norman aristocracy that eventually led to Hastings. Queen Emma successfully bridged the gaps among those three disparate societies, and was the wife of two kings of England, and the mother of two onthers, not to mention the great aunt of Wiliam the Conqueror. It's an exciting story, one that often reads like fiction, but it is all true. Love, greed, murder, betrayal, and all of the other virtues and vices we know so well are present in this tale, and it is well worth reading!
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Queen Emma and the Vikings: Power, Love, and Greed in 11th Century England
Available from Amazon
Price: $19.96
Updated on 6-21-2008.
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