![]() ![]() The battles and feuds here are not only important in themselves they are foci of dramatic irony on the grandest of scales. ![]() One of the strengths of Hill's gloomy novel is precisely this sense of significance and foreboding. superbly evoked the wordplay of the periods poetry as it unfolds a compelling story of Earl Godwins battles against the Norse The year is 1016 and England burns while the Viking armies blockade the great city of London. Shieldwall is the story of how Harold Godwin rose from being the son of a comparatively obscure and exiled thane to become the most powerful man in England – a man whose son became the king, briefly, and precipitated the Norman Conquest by doing so. ASunday Times Book of the YearJustin Hills Shieldwall. After travel books and novels in which Justin Hill dealt with the matter of China, writing about the forging of England must have seemed not only a challenge but a way of coming home: of writing about the landscapes of Sussex and the North before a millennium of agricultural revolutions, and about a very different and more dangerous Britain. ![]() There is a lot to be said for historical fiction as a way of filling in those gaps, providing us with a sense of events and progression and giving them a human face. Shieldwall van Justin Hill Book Worth Reading, First Down, Fiction Books, Detective. There are holes in our sense of the past, places where the average person's knowledge does a jump-cut - from Alfred building his kingdom to Ethelred paying the Danes to go away to Canute and the waves and then the Norman Conquest. ![]()
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