You won't be surprised that one of the things I greatly enjoy about my job is seeing all the new books come in. Since I work in a university library, most of what we order is of a scholarly nature, but not every book is necessarily academic. Recently a new professor was hired in the English department and her area is Medieval Irish and British Literature, including Arthurian Literature and Anglo-Saxon Literature. Actually she teaches quite a few subjects within this area. Since she is a new faculty member we've been ordering books to beef up our collection for the areas she teaches and does research in. I am always fascinated by the books that come in that she's requested. While many are of a very scholarly nature and far beyond what I might want to read or could handle reading, there are other books that are as much for the layman as the academic.
Recently a book on the Bayeux Tapestry came in that I noted and hope to borrow at some point. Last week Harriet O'Brien's Queen Emma and the Vikings: A History of Power, Love, and Greed in 11th-Century England came in and I couldn't help myself and had to check it out right away. Normally I can only handle one nonfiction title at a time and then I am slow at reading even one book. I mostly just wanted to peruse the book, but I found it so interesting that I kept reading past the first couple of pages. She lived at a time when the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all vying for control of Britain. She married (and saw buried) two English kings, two of her sons were crowned and enthroned and she was great-aunt to William the Conqueror. I always find it so incredible the power some woman wielded at periods in history when women had little control over their own lives. I think I am going to have to keep reading this one.
"From political pawn Emma became an unscrupulous manipulator for power, and along the way was diversely regarded by her contemporaries as a generous Christian patron, the admired co-regent of a prosperous nation, and a callous and treacherous mother. She was, above all, a survivor, her life marked by dramatic reversals of fortune, all of which she overcame."
What I like about finding this book now is that I am reading two other books set in about the same period and all three are crossing paths. Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower, which is about the making of the Bayeux Tapestry after William conquered England and Betsy Tobin's Ice Land set in the 11th century. It's strange to think of the Vikings in England, but they were. Imagine traveling in a Viking Longboat. I have a hard time imagining sailing in the best of conditions, but these longships apparently were a force to be reckoned with. And they traveled from Norway to Ireland and Britain, to Iceland and Greenland and even the coast of Canada and America. I'm curious how the Vikings fit in with Emma. She was Norman, and I always thought Normans were French. They actually weren't. "In origin the Normans were not French at all but 'north men', Vikings who had been ceded territory around the Seine in the early 900s." I'm most especially interested in reading about an 11th century woman.
"Emma's world seems in some instances almost intangible, but at other times wholly alien. Her story is one of power, politics, love, greed and scandal. By tracing that story the England that became her home emerges. It was an England that Emma's Norman family was shortly to conquer and change radically, and her story also tells us why that happened."
She was born into a titled family, one of seven children. She would not have received much of an education, but I have to share this about needlework:
"She would have learnt the art of fine needlework--no idle occupation since the embroidered wallhangings created by aristocratic ladies had a very necessary purpose as draught excluders in houses and halls where glass has as yet to become a common feature for windows. However, she would not have demeaned herself with weaving, which was the work of less noble women."
I find women's lives intriguing, especially when they lived in brutal times and still managed to carve out a place for themselves in history.