Tom Shippey

Medieval people​ lived in much closer proximity to animals than most of us do today, but had less sense of their variety. Who in 12th-century England would have seen an elephant or a crocodile? Tales filtered back from Crusaders and distant travellers of a giant herbivore with a nose so long and pliable that it could pick up men and seat them on its back, and of an armour-plated carnivore...

Modern academic historians​ want nothing to do with King Arthur. ‘There is no historical evidence about Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the...

The two words​ of Max Adams’s title are in a way antithetical. Alfred is the only English king to be referred to regularly as ‘the Great’, and once upon a time the reason was well known to everyone.* It was because, early in the year 878, hiding out incognito in a peasant’s hut in the Somerset Levels, he ‘burned the cakes’. Some 12 years before,...

Levi Roach​’s book is an attempt to redeem the reputation of Æthelred II, king of England, with one interruption, from 978 to 1016. This is a hard task, as the book’s title concedes: Æthelred has been known as ‘the Unready’ for around a thousand years. Ever since 1066 and All That (originally a parody of Oxford University exam papers) he has also been...

At the start​ of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country...