Battle for the Island Kingdom by Don Hollway

Battle for the Island Kingdom: England’s Destiny 1000-1066
By Don Hollway
Osprey 2023

Historian Don Hollway’s first book, The Last Viking, was a memorably spirited biography Harald Sigurdsson, called “Hardrada,” mostly known to history as one of the big losers of 1066, when he died at the Battle of Stamford Bridge fighting the forces of the English King Harold Godwinson, who would die two weeks later at the Battle of Hastings, leaving England as the battlefield prize of William the Conqueror. 

Harald Hardrada led a vigorous, fascinating life, but surely more than a few readers of The Last Viking finished it wishing Hollway would broaden his focus and tell the story of Harald’s world and times, and those readers get their wish in Hollway’s big new book, Battle for the Island Kingdom, which does exactly that, filling in the rest of Harald’s time with all of the violent outsized personalities who all had the same obsession: England. “It had always been the Island Kingdom’s curse,” Hollway writes, “to be just visible enough to observers across the water, to tempt the boldest to try conquering it.”

Battle for the Island Kingdom is the story of a three-way tug-of-war between the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, and the Vikings, and of course it’s the Vikings who steal the show. Hollway draws on the whole array of sources, from the latest archeological finds to the hard data that can be gleaned from Icelandic Sagas (“When King Cnut ruled over England and Denmark, Olaf Haraldsson ruled over Norway,” goes the Knytlinga Saga, for instance. “Then there was discord between King Olaf and King Cnut), and it’s from this combination of sources that Hollway reconstructs his amazing cast of characters. Foremost of these are England’s most unlikely king, Svein Forkbeard, Aethelred the Unready (Hollway styles it “Ill-Advised”), and especially Olaf the Stout, who dies thirty years before the book’s concluding events but still manages to dominate the narrative, always in the spotlight of events, always ready with the best lines. In the winter of 1024, for instance, Cnut sends a delegation to Olaf demanding homage and tribute. “As might be expected, this did not go over well,” Hollway writes. “According to his saga [that would be King Olaf’s Saga, cracking good reading in its own right], Olaf told the emissaries, ‘I will defend Norway with axe and sword as long as I live, and will pay tribute to no man for my kingdom.’” 

The 70 years covered by Hollway’s narrative featured decades of peace punctuated by explosions of violence. It was an era of extremely avaricious men and women, and England – with its endless shorelines, navigable rivers, and rich forests – was a prize that filled their minds, a goal to which they fought and angled through intrigue, propaganda, marriage bargains, and of course the axe and sword. It’s all such a vivid backdrop that its excitement manages to bleed through even the most dry and academic accounts.

Hollway’s book is anything but dry. At every turn, he infuses his accounts with a novelist’s flair, as when Olaf (him again) attempts to destroy London Bridge:

While the furious defenders dumped more stones over the rail onto the longships below, Olaf and his men flung grappling hooks and lines around the bridge pilings and supports, and when they had a secure hold, rowed hard downstream. One can imagine the slack lines snapping taught out of the water and fairly humming as the longships, still being pelted with arrows, spears and stones, hung on the far ends like dead weight, with Olaf and his captains bawling at their men to put their backs into their oars, and men on the bridge frantically clambering down the sides of the bridge to hack at the ines. Too late. 

Even readers with a cursory recall of English history will know how Battle for the Island Kingdom ends (there’s an entire tapestry about it), but Hollway makes it feel so loud and headlong that the story feels both new and unpredictable. Just as with The Last Viking, he’s filled a long-lost era with color and life.  A biography from him of William the Conqueror would be a cause for celebration; a full-dress life-and-times of Svein Forkbeard – the first in English – would be a dream come true. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.