When the foreign student of English first comes to England he realizes, as perhaps he has never realized before, the difference between possessing a theoretical knowledge of the language and possessing the capacity for using the language in everyday speech. Hitherto he may have looked upon his work either as an interesting linguistic study or as a tedious but necessary preliminary to the passing of some dreaded examination...But on his arrival in England he finds that his relation towards the language has necessarily changed.
Like Bernard Cornwell, Hollick mines the richly textured history of Saxon England, producing a striking portrait of an unruly era poised on the threshold of major transformation. Married off to King Aethelred of England at age 13, Emma, daughter of the Duke of Normandy, far exceeds her value as a strategic female pawn, as she pledges her enduring allegiance to her adopted homeland. Despising her weakling husband, she and her children retreat to Normandy when England is invaded by the Danes. However, her all-consuming passion to save her country and retain her crown eventually leads her into the confidence as well as the arms of Cnut, Viking king of England.
As he did most recently--and with greater success--in London (LJ 6/15/97), Rutherfurd offers a sweeping picture of an area of England by focusing on a few families who lived there. This time he concentrates on the New Forest, part of the southern coast of England bounded by the English Channel. Rutherfurd traces the lives of peasants, smugglers, churchmen, woodsmen, and upper-class families from the 11th to the 20th centuries. These assorted men and women take part in the events surrounding the death of King Rufus (William the Conqueror's son), the failure of the Spanish Armada, England's Civil War, and more.
J.R.R. Tolkien's zeal for medieval literary, religious, and cultural ideas deeply influenced his entire life and provided the seeds for his own fiction. In Tolkien's Art, Chance discusses not only such classics as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, but focuses on his minor works as well, outlining in detail the sources and influences--from pagan epic to Christian legend-that formed the foundation of Tolkien's masterpieces, his "mythology for England.
Court Politics, Culture and Literature in Scotland and England 1500 - 1540
The focus of this study is court literature in early sixteenth-century England and Scotland. Author Jon Robinson examines courtly poetry and drama in the context of a complex system of entertainment, education, self-fashioning, dissimulation, propaganda and patronage. He places selected works under close critical scrutiny to explore the symbiotic relationship that existed between court literature and important socio-political, economic and national contexts of the period 1500 to 1540.The first two chapters discuss the pervasive influence of patronage upon court literature through an analysis of the panegyric verse that surrounded the coronation of Henry VIII.
