Tomás Kalmar is an activist, linguist, mathematician, community worker, medievalist, school-bus driver, musician, educationalist and researcher in literacy whose outlook encompasses many continents and cultures. I think of him as a kind of intellectual shaman for the twenty-first century. Tomás is the perfect person to help us understand how the uncertainties about the birthdate of the celebrated medieval English King Alfred connect with many major themes of life today, from Brexit to the war in Ukraine and beyond. This book represents a lifetime of thought, research and debate by Tomás about King Alfred but it also reflects his wider intellectual and personal journey. Tomas has produced one of the most idiosyncratic and thought-provoking studies of medieval British history to have appeared in recent years. In its originality, range of intellectual reference and distinct voice, Tomás’s book can be compared with Asser’s Life of Alfred itself.

Tomás’s book is compelling because of the way it lays bare the ideological and cultural contexts of what might otherwise seem a matter of pedantic antiquarian interest. The story of King Alfred is intimately bound up with the articulation of Britain’s invented national narrative, that island story beloved of politicians from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. King Alfred stood at the head of the Whig ‘Temple of Worthies’ at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire; ‘Rule Britannia’ was originally the final number in Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred. The idea that we can strip away these later accretions and use the power of Victorian German philology and text-criticism to restore and recover the original Alfred is a chimera. Whatever we think or say about Alfred is shaped by a millennium of myths, a heritage it is impossible to escape. We may imagine that these myths are so much deadwood to be stripped away, but it is precisely because Alfred is at the heart of cultural archetypes which have shaped not just Britain, but the whole English-speaking world, that Alfred the Great remains a vital subject for study in the twenty-first century.

Tomás memorably describes for us the remarkable range of characters who energetically sought during the nineteenth century to reinvent Alfred as the founding father of the British Empire and apostle of an Anglosphere.