Mythology of the Past

Mythology of the dim and undim past
creates a version of it that essentially
transforms it so that it becomes the last
unchallenged view concerning it eventually,

the only version that’s believed by all
the people who consider that they’ve been affected
by it, and while believing it, think that they can recall
the glories that by academic historians are frequently suspected

of falsity, which does not lead to the invalidation
— by people Joseph Soloveitchik identifies as lonely men of faith —
of mythologies, due to immunity caused by imagination,
as a specter haunting them, less specious than a wraith.

In “One of the greats: Alfred’s overambitious grandson,” TLS, 10/17/25, Michael Wood, reviewing First King of England: Aethelstan and the birth of  kingdom by David Woodman, writes:

Not long ago, the podcast The Rest Is History ran a competition to determine England’s greatest ruler. There were the usual suspects: Henry II, Henry V, Elizabeth I, Victoria, even Elizabeth II. To most people’s surprise, however, the winner was the West Saxon Athelstan, the first king of all England, lawmaker, patron of learning, founder of parliament, victor at Brunanburh. With that, you could say the Athelstan bandwagon has at last really begun to roll. Recent full-length studies include those by Sarah Foot and Tom Holland, and now David Woodman has turned his attention to the king and his critical place in British history. As a continental poet in his entourage wrote in summer 927, “King Athelstan lives glorious through his deeds, in this completed England”.

Woodman begins his book with a question from his old tutor at Cambridge, the distinguished early English historian Simon Keynes: “If you were to write a biography of King Athelstan, what would its main themes be?”. Therein lies the issue. Is a conventional biography, rather than a study of themes, even possible? How do we get to the particularities of an early medieval life when we have virtually none of the tools a would-be biographer might hope for – contemporary accounts, letters, memoirs, speeches?