CHARLEMAGNE: The Legend and the Man

by Harold Lamb ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 1954

Harold Lamb has learned the art of merging really enormous scholarship with a true sense of story and drama and character. In his Charlemagne he has tapped sources of ancient manuscripts, preserved in monasteries and museums and state archives, and the result is the most unusual and completely rounded portrait of a great emperor whose story has hitherto been shrouded in legend. Here we follow him from his gauche, insecure boyhood, through years of welding together the disparate elements of a Europe that was still largely pagan, and making of it a vast Western world sanctified by ecclesiastical authority. One reads of his casual succession of marriages, his growing family- sons who must have kingdoms, daughters who must be wed. One likes best his ability to live with and for his people, knowing them at all levels. With small education, along in middle life he found a teacher to his liking, the canny Alcuin, under whom the palace school became, for its day, a center of learning. Charlemagne was an extraordinary administrator; some of his methods, such as leaving conquered people with a sense of independent functioning, codifying laws, strengthening his boundaries by establishment of marches, have a very modern note. There was the other side too:-massacres and forced transplanting of whole communities left their heritage of horror. The whole portrait of the man and the period is an enriching experience for the reader.

Pub Date: March 25, 1954

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1954

Categories: NONFICTION