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Lost Realms - Histories of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R579
Discovery Miles 5 790
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Lost Realms - Histories of Britain from the Romans to the Vikings (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R579
Discovery Miles 5 790
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history
of our forgotten past. As Tolkien knew, Britain in the 'Dark Ages'
was a mosaic of little kingdoms. Many of them fell by the wayside.
Some vanished without a trace. Others have stories that can be
told. ELMET. HWICCE. LINDSEY. DUMNONIA. ESSEX. RHEGED. POWYS.
SUSSEX. FORTRIU. In Lost Realms, Thomas Williams, bestselling
author of Viking Britain, uncovers the forgotten origins and
untimely demise of nine kingdoms that hover in the twilight between
history and fable, whose stories hum with saints and gods and
miracles, with giants and battles and the ruin of cities. Why did
some realms - like Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and Gwynedd -
prosper while these nine fell? From the Scottish Highlands to the
Cornish coastline, from the Welsh borders to the Thames Estuary,
Williams brings together new archaeological revelations with the
few precious fragments of written sources to have survived to
rebuild a lost world; a world where the halls of farmer-lords
survive as ghost-marks in the soil, where the vestiges of
hill-forts cling to rocky outcrops and grave-fields and
barrow-mounds shelter the bodies of the ancient dead. This is the
world of Arthur and Urien, Bede and Taliesin; of the Picts and
Britons and Saxon migration; of magic and war, myth and miracle. In
riveting detail, Williams uses Britain's ancient landscape to
resurrect a lost past where lives were lived with as much vigour
and joy as in any other age, where people fought and loved and
toiled and suffered grief and disappointment just as cutting as our
own. In restoring some of these voices, he raises questions
matching many we face today: how do nations form and why do some
fail? How do communities adapt to catastrophe, and how do people
insulate themselves from change? How do we construct the past, and
why do we - like the people of early medieval Britain - revere it,
often finding in the tales of those long-gone a curious sense of
belonging?
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