Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts. by Magnús Fjalldal. Toronto Old Norse and Icelandic Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 162. $40 paper, $60 cloth.

The title of this book promises a survey of facts pertaining to Anglo-Saxon England, as it was depicted in medieval Icelandic narratives, and Fjalldal has made good on his promise. Not everybody may realize how controversial the topic is. The tone of the exposition is courteous, but the spirit informing it is unabashedly polemical. Since Fjalldal disagrees with many of his colleagues, they will, as a matter of course, disagree with him. Yet it seems that his main conclusions will be hard to refute. He shows that the authors of family and romantic sagas and of saints' lives had the vaguest idea of the geography and history of England. The genealogy and the details of kings' lives (even of King Cnut's life) were misrepresented in Icelandic medieval books. Some battles and invasions described in them found no reflection in contemporary chronicles and hardly ever took place. Not only fictitious dialogues like those between Haraldr and Harold or between Harald and tostig before the battle of Stamford bridge but even the information on Tostig's right to the throne must be ascribed to fantasy. The following statements summarize Fjalldal's views:

How much these Viking settlers actually knew about the geography of England as a whole, or of the area which they had chosen for their settlement, we shall never know. However, as their forefathers had raided England for decades, they may well have known quite a lot. There is no evidence that this knowledge of English geography ever found its way to Iceland, nor was there any reason why Icelanders in the tenth and the eleventh centuries would have been particularly interested in it. Icelandic writers began to record topographical information about England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but their sources are unknown, and—on the whole—their knowledge of English geography is sometimes less than impressive. However, they are not wrong about everything, and not surprisingly, the most accurate statements concerning the geography of England concern Northumbria . …(pp. 22­23)

Basically, medieval Icelandic historians knew only the order of English kings from Athelstan to Stephen, and, sometimes, how long each king reigned. …the rest is, for the most part, a rather garbled version of what took place (p. 68).