On the English.
In the historical notes at the end of one of your later Last Kingdom books you muse as to why the Germanic settlers in Britain chose to call themselves Angles and their language Anglish. Here is a suggestion. The clue may lie in Geography, the name of the Angles is supposed to derive from the word for a bend so where was this angled land?. We tend to think in terms of land, Eng Land, Scot Land etc but the people who migrated to Britain were a maritime people who buried their kings in ships. If you think in terms of sea rather than land then an obvious candidate for the Angle is the entrance to the Baltic sea and the Angles could have been “the folk of the bent sea” a term that could possibly extend to anyone taking that route into the former Roman Empire. It’s worth noting that two of Germany’s major waterways, the Elbe and the Oder terminate either side of the base of the Danish peninsular so the catchment area for emigres could have been much larger than the traditional homeland of the Anglo Saxons.
In Britain you would therefore have settlers from many different tribes who share a common language. Whether the settlement is peaceful or hostile they need something to unite them as each individual group would be overwhelmed by the Britons. One thing that they all have in common is that they or their ancestors “sailed the bent sea”. As someone who works in the Offshore Industry I am certain that this was a somewhat perilous journey so having done this makes you special and could create a common bond that overcomes tribal differences. In the Ninth century it would have been in Alfred’s interest to create a common identity so that the people of the other kingdoms did not feel like vassals of Wessex. Being one of the Anglefolk could have been that common identity.
It’s also worth noting that people can have multiple identities, think of someone from Liverpool who is Scouse, English, and British so it’s quite possible that a Bavarian living on the Isle of White is called a Saxon by the Britons, but think of themselves as both Bavarian (my family) and Anglefolk (my people).
On Steel
As a Metallurgist I have an interest in early iron and steel making. In the Empty Throne you talk about the Vilfbert steel, which was being made in India. Steel is a wonderful alloy because, unlike bronze you can adjust the properties of the metal by changing the chemical condition and then by quenching, tempering or annealing. The problem is that changes of less than 1% make the difference between a soft, malleable sword that bends in battle and a hard one that will cut through iron but shatters from a blow. Steel used to be made in a completely different way during the 9th century. The furnaces that were used to produce iron were not hot enough to melt the metal, to what was produced had a very low carbon content (think trying to dissolve sugar into an ice cube compared to a cup of hot water) and was consequently softer than bronze. In order to harden it iron rods had to be baked in stone chests filled with charcoal for days or weeks. The result was unpredictable. There were two solutions, either, as the Anglo Saxons did you hammer weld a soft iron bar to a brittle steel bar and then twist or fold this to form a composite so that the soft iron can take shock loads and the hard steel cut, or, as the Indians discovered you can make a furnace that is hot enough to melt the iron, so that the carbon mixes evenly with the iron giving you much more control over the end process. It’s interesting to note that my discipline Metallurgy started when British scientists set out to discover why Indian steel was superior to European steel. It may also be of interest to note that the most advanced modern steels replicate the Anglo Saxon technique but on a microscopic scale.
Mike Adams FIMMM