Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources Book

This is a great book to get hold of if you are interested in the Anglo-Saxons or early medieval history. It's packed full of source material - enough to get the curious going, not just Asser's life of Alfred which fascinatingly stops well before Alfred's death (did Asser just die unbeknown to us before he could finish the work?), extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a Latin translation thereof, as well as some wills and laws.

Alternatively if you only know Alfred from secondary material then turn to this slim volume and see what historians have to work with.

Alfred as we know him is the gift of Asser to posterity. The fact of the existence of the Life is all we have, did Alfred commission it - and if so to what end? If he did then that might explain the abruptness of the ending and the sense in places that it was a draft. On the other hand if not what might have inspired Asser - a Welshman not a Wessexman - to write it? Was this kingdom building through imitation - as Charlemagne had his Einhard so Alfred must have his Asser?

In anycase what we have a crafted media presentation for which we can only be grateful, for the want of anymore, his son King Edward the Elder and daughter Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians remain in the shadows, obscurer figures far.