Though Ryan Lavelle’s biography of Æthelred is the last of the four that I read, it was the oldest of the bunch. Originally published in 2002, it was the first to employ the recent scholarly work by Simon Keynes, Patrick Wormald and others to construct a biography of the long-disparaged Anglo-Saxon king. For this reason alone I approached Lavelle’s book with respect.
As I read it, I came to appreciate its other virtues. Like the other books I have read about the monarchs of the era, Lavelle uses context to fill in the gaps of what we know about Æthelred’s reign. Lavelle is unique among Æthelred’s other biographers, though, in how he goes about this. In addition to covering Æthelred’s predecessors and the general background of 10th century Anglo-Saxon England (which takes up the first quarter of his book), Lavelle devotes considerable attention to Æthelred’s Scandinavian opponents – more so than any of the other authors I have read up to this point. I found the approach both refreshing and highly informative for the perspective it provided.
This was not the only aspect that distinguished Lavelle’s book from its counterparts. Another was Lavelle’s extensive use of maps and illustrations. Many of these were incidental to his focus on Æthelred, but I found them very helpful in constructing a visual and special sense of Æthelred’s time. Taken together with Lavelle’s coverage of the Vikings, it makes his book one that many readers especially might value even more as a starting point for learning about Æthelred’s era than Abels’s shorter, more Æthelred-centric book.
The main downside to Lavelle’s approach is that he often loses focus on Æthelred himself. This makes it more challenging to get a sense of the author’s interpretation of his subject. For the most part his judgment is in line with those of Æthelred’s other biographers, as Lavelle pushed back against the “Unready” criticism by emphasizing Æthelred’s success as a monarch prior to 1000 and the scope of the challenges he faced in the later years of his reign. Lavelle’s concentration on the Scandinavians helps the latter goal, as it highlights the scale of the challenge the Vikings posed to Æthelred better than any of the other biographies about him. That this comes at the cost of a loss of focus on Æthelred himself is unfortunate, though one that I felt a little less keenly after having read the other three books about him. Because of this, I finished the book with mixed feelings about it. As an introduction to Æthelred’s era the book it is by far the best of the bunch, as it gives its readers a really accessible overview of both England and the Scandinavian world that played such an important role in the events of the time. Anyone seeking a more in-depth study of Æthelred, however, would be better off turning to one of the authors who followed Lavelle in writing biographies of the king.