Battle for the Island Kingdom

REVIEW BY JEFFREY JAMES This new book by Don Hollway ambitiously sets out to describe the complex interplay between competing European royal houses during what academics call ‘The Second Viking Age’. Hollway does so by examining the motivations and ambitions driving the period’s main actors: notably, Æthelred the Unready, Cnut, Queen Emma of Normandy, Emma’s son Edward the Confessor, his successor King Harold Godwinson, and Harold’s rivals for the kingship of England, Harald Hardrada of Norway and William the Bastard of Normandy. Men and women feature in equal measure in the book, and family inter-relationships become important threads throughout the narrative. The author br