Lost Realms

Thomas Williams is author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Viking Britain. He was a curator of the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend in 2014 and is now Curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. He undertook doctoral research at University College London and has taught and lectured in history and archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

PRAISE FOR LOST REALMS ‘Sceptical, scrupulous, written with wit and flair’Financial Times‘This brilliant history of Dark Age Britain mixes serious scholarship with nods to pop culture, from Tolkien to The Wicker Man… Lost Realms is a joy to read’The Telegraph, FIVE STAR REVIEW‘Williams makes a compelling guide as he steers us through the darkness’ Spectator‘Williams has a fine command of the literary, administrative, religious and archaeological sources of early medieval Britain. He is a diligent scholar and a likeable writer’ Sunday Times‘Thomas Williams is an exceptionally vivid and exciting writer, and his wonderfully evocative recreations are just what the generally impoverished and bewildering evidence for early medieval Britain requires. He is also however a meticulous, honest and fair-minded scholar, and his careful analysis of that evidence, material and textual, always establishes its limitations as well as its potential. His consideration of the losers of Anglo-Saxon state building provides a genuinely original and illuminating perspective on how England came to be’Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch'Thomas Williams has blended a potent brew of mythic and material fragments to raise forgotten kings & queens (and their stories) from the grave. An historian not afraid of the dark and with eyes adapted to it – what he sees is assessed sagely and described beautifully'Christopher Hadley, author of Hollow Places