The story of this book is almost as interesting as the story in it. The author, Tomás Kalmar, a Mexican national who grew up in Australia and now lives in the United States, and never had the luxury of a tenured academic post, worked on it for six decades. In 1962 the young Kalmar developed a relationship with V H Galbraith, then visiting Berkeley; the eminent medievalist had written an influential article on Asser’s Life of Alfred that cast doubt on the authorship and dating of that work (Galbraith Reference Galbraith and Galbraith1964). For Galbraith, as for many scholars of the first half of the twentieth century, Alfred was another national icon whose balloon of heroic deeds needed bursting; showing the Life to be the work not of ‘Asser’ (a real ninth-century bishop) but rather a tenth- or early eleventh-century concoction heavily plagiarised from Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne undermined both author and subject. Kalmar (who acknowledges Asser’s debt to Einhard, but sees it as literary imitatio rather than historical theft) remained unconvinced, and after a career mainly spent teaching languages and mathematics, he has at last published this elegant and learned study of Alfred’s cult, its champions and its critics in nineteenth- and early twentieth century England. The lengthy fermentation has paid off.

The Victorians loved heroes, especially Anglo-Saxon ones (this was also the heyday of post-1066 resistance fighter Hereward ‘the Wake’). While earlier Celtic predecessors such as King Arthur had long since been dispatched to the shadowland of myth and fiction, Alfred stood on firmer ground, both because he left literate remains of his own, or at least authorised by him, and because we have independent evidence both textual and archaeological of his existence (the famous ‘Alfred Jewel’ now in Oxford’s Ashmolean, for instance). In an age of nationalist pride that then valued Teutonic rather more than Celtic forebears, Alfred seemed a perfect candidate for a pedestal, the lad who providentially succeeded to the Crown and became the saviour of Wessex and England from the Danes.

But Alfred, too, was not immune from an agglomeration of legend and pseudo-history, thanks in no small measure to writers in that earlier age of Alfredianism, the seventeenth century, when the study of Old English, pioneered in the sixteenth, had enabled a much greater interest in the ‘Saxons’ as they were then called. The nineteenth century added ‘Anglo-’ before the Saxon, but retained justified scepticism toward aspects of Alfredian lore – his foundation of the University of Oxford and his preternaturally precocious literary and linguistic skills among them. It was the task of a series of Victorian scholars to purify the icon of mythical accretions. A great deal hinged on precise matters in the chronology of Alfred’s childhood (hence the present book’s subtitle) including the king’s birthdate, the timing of his trip to Rome to meet the pope and the year of his accession.

The dramatis personae of Kalmar’s study include several lights of varying brightness in the Victorian and Edwardian scholarly worlds: J A Giles, a classicist whose clerical misdeeds would land him in prison; Martin Tupper, the early (and laughably incompetent) Victorian translator of Alfred’s poetry at the time of the 1849 millenary celebration of the king’s birth (and whose clumsy idolatry did Alfred’s reputation no favours); Henry Howorth, the Manchester-based amateur historian and arch-sceptic for whom Alfred was merely a latter-day King Arthur; the Anglo-Saxonist John Earle and his reviser Charles Plummer, who, with their publication of two versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, would purge the cult of its hagiographic elements and liberate Alfred’s historicity from its dependence on Asser’s Life; William Henry Stevenson, the editor of the definitive edition of the Life; and, eventually, Henry Howorth’s own intellectual heir, Galbraith. Several others play important supporting roles, not least the eminent historian and Anglican bishop, William Stubbs, and the Catholic bishop of Clifton, William Clifford. Chapter by chapter, Kalmar carefully unravels the vicissitudes of the Alfredian cult in prose that is both charming and often funny: witticisms and mischievous observations abound that leaven but do not undermine the seriousness of the scholarship.

A short review such as this cannot trace in detail the labyrinthine path trodden here by Kalmar through the ups and downs of Alfred’s, and Asser’s, reputations and the often quaintly polite scholarly thrusts and parries over them, but through close reading, the judicious application of psychology and a sympathetic view toward (most of) his precursors, Kalmar has written a model account of the forensic work involved in establishing a distant figure’s historical bona fides, and perhaps the best discussion of the genteel quirkiness of mid- to late-Victorian antiquarian debates we are likely to have for some time.