(i) Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series which shows -
an alternative outcome of the second war between Rome and Carthage;
a potential alternative outcome of the Northern Revolt in the Roman Empire;
Goths rejecting or responding to Roman/Christian influence;
Britain after Roman withdrawal;
(ii) Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy about the decline of the Western Roman Empire;
(iii) Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, set in the Eastern Roman Empire;
(iv) SM Stirling's Make The Darkness Light series about an alternative Roman Empire;
(v) Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization which features an eventual Terran Empire.
See also the blog search result for "Ilion."
My mind boggles!
Of course, the Aeneid connects with much more, e.g., Dante's Inferno, but it is the works by the Andersons and Stirling that mostly concern us here.
19 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
One complication I've read somewhere being how some historians think the Western Empire, when it rallied during the later years of Honorius' reign, reoccupied the Britannic diocese. But the reoccupation was shaky and seems to have ended by or before AD 440.
Ad astra! Sean
They've done some genetic research on the Anglo-Saxon migrations; there was 75% replacement along the east coast, and 30%-40% on the border of Wales and Cornwall.
That's not as drastic as the replacement around 2500 BCE, when the western Indo-Europeans settled in Britain -- that was a 93% replacement.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It sure seems pretty drastic to me! It fits the usual human pattern: invading barbarians kill all adult males, rape the women, and enslave some. Surviving Romano-Britons being driven to Wales/Cornwall.
Ad astra! Sean
Well, often enough that means upper-class males. A substantial amount of the British peasantry survived the Anglo-Saxon conquest; when Wessex got to write down its laws, there were British communities scattered around. The 2500 BCE invasion was more absolute, and may have involved plague as well as violence.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
No objection. I have read St. Bede's ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY and Aser's biographical notes about Alfred the Great. I agree a substantial part of the Romano-Briton population survived under Anglo-Saxon rule.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yeah, but there were a -lot- of Anglo-Saxons, so the linguistic situation 'turned Old English'. Note that precisely the opposite happened in most places on the European continent.
The Slavs replaced most of the Latin-speaking northern Balkans (except Romania) but that was a broad folk-movement too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I agree. I know Latin was displaced in Britannia and the non-Romanian parts of the Balkans.
Scholarly minded Anglo-Saxons, like St. Bede, after their people converted to Christianity, did make a point of studying Latin. And Bede even learned Greek. Historians consider the lifespan of Bede (died 735) to be the Anglo-Saxon golden age, before the devastation of the Viking raids and invasions.
Ad astra! Sean
sean: that was also before Wessex unified the English.
Kaor, Mr. Strling!
It was! It took hard fighting and wily maneuvering by Alfred the Great for Wessex to barely survive as the last of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Anderson had a very high opinion of King Alfred, and was surprised he was never canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Poul was right -- Alfred laid the foundations for the unified kingdom of England, after the Vikings were defeated. Nobody objected, either, because it was obviously safer!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very true. King Alfred laid the foundations, on which his son Edward the Elder built, and his grandson Athelstan complected the process by conquering the rest of England, becoming the first real king of England.
There were some road bumps, however, not all the Viking descended inhabitants of northern England took kindly to rule by the Wessex kings. We see some of that in Anderson's MOTHER OF KINGS, when Erik Blood-Ax, after being deposed as king of Norway, was able to make himself king of York for a time. But King Edgar defeated and killed Erik, and reconquered the north of England--and this time the unification stuck.
Ad astra! Sean
Correcton: I checked and it was Edgar's uncle, King Eadred, who regained northern England.
Sean
Note that Brittany is called Brittany because a substantial number of Britons settled there, fleeing the Anglo-Saxons.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did think of Brittany, called Armorica in Roman days. I was focusing on the Romano-Britons who remained in Britannia.
Ad astra! Sean
I was struck by the similarities between "Armorica" and "America" but that is purely coincidental.
Note that the official language of the first kingdom of England was the -Wessex- dialect of Anglo-Saxon... which was notably conservative and similar to Low German.
As late as the 17th century, country-folk in Wessex were still using constructions like "geboren".
Modern English is descended from an East Midlands dialect which moved into London after the Black Death.
It's heavily influenced by both Scandinavian and French, and grammatically simplified.
"Simplified" in the sense of using an analytic rather than inflectional system for most things -- so word order is much more important. "Man bites dog" is different from "dog bites man", which it isn't in a more inflected language. In fact, English and Afrikaans are the most analytical Indo-European languages. PIE was heavily inflected -- almost comically so.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Those east mid-landers migrated to London because the Black Death had pretty much exterminated the more Germanic Old/Middle English speakers there.
Interesting, the way I speak/write modern English is far more analytic than inflectional.
Ad astra! Sean
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