Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. This new work by Magnús Fjalldal is the first to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography. Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter þættir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal finds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors - from the early thirteenth century onwards (although they were rather poorly informed about England before 1066) - created a largely imaginary country where friendly, generous, although rather ineffective kings living under constant threat welcomed the assistance of saga heroes to solve their problems. The England of Icelandic medieval texts is more of a stage than a country, and chiefly functions to provide saga heroes with fame abroad. Since many of these texts are rarely examined outside of Iceland or in the English language, Fjalldal's book is important for scholars of both medieval Norse culture and Anglo-Saxon England.

"English Historical Documents is the most comprehensive, annotated collection of documents on British (not in reality just English) history ever compiled. Conceived during the Second World War with a view to ensuring the most important historical documents remained available and accessible in perpetuity, the first volume came out in 1953, and the most recent volume almost sixty years later. The print series, edited by David C. Douglas, is a magisterial survey of British history, covering the years 500 to 1914 and including around 5,500 primary sources, all selected by leading historians Editors. It has over the years become an indispensable resource for generations of students, researchers and lecturers. EHD is now available in its entirety online. Bringing EHD into the digital age has been a long and complex process. To provide you with first-rate, intelligent searchability, Routledge have teamed up with the Institute of Historical Research (one of the research institutes that make up the School of Advanced Study, University of London http://www.history.ac.uk) to produce EHD Online. The IHR's team of experts have fully indexed the documents, using an exhaustive historical thesaurus developed by the Royal Historical Society for its Bibliography of British and Irish History. The sources include treaties, statutes, declarations, government and cabinet proceedings, military dispatches, orders, acts, sermons, newspaper articles, pamphlets, personal and official letters, diaries and more. Each section of documents and many of the documents themselves are accompanied by editorial commentary. The sources cover a wide spectrum of topics, from political and constitutional issues to social, economic, religious as well as cultural history."--[Résumé de l'éditeur].