Those of you who have read Anya Seton's Avalon will have a good idea of the situation into which the thirteen-year-old Emma of Normandy found herself thrust when she was married off to Aethelred of England. King Aethelred was the son of Edgar and of Queen Aelfthryth, the villain of Anya Seton's book, and was half-brother of Prince, briefly King, Edmund, whom Aelfthryth had had murdered to ensure the succession of her own son.
Aefthryth reigned as Queen throughout Aethelred's early years as King. Neither of his first two wives was crowned Queen (there could be only one). But in 1001 Aelfthryth finally died, to the relief of all and sundry (including her son) and a new Queen could be crowned. Aethelred chose Emma.
Harriet O'Brien tells the story of Emma's life with Aethelred and subsequently with his successor, Cnut, who married her to help legitimise his succession; of her rivalry with Cnut's first wife, Aelfgifu of Northampton; of the brief reign of her son by Cnut, Harthacnut, and the longer reign of her son by Aethelred, (St) Edward the Confessor. And she recounts the history of the period, which takes us from an England little changed from the days of Alfred, with the Kings of Wessex claiming to rule the whole country but the Danes in fact ruling large parts of it, right up to the Norman Conquest, when Emma's great-nephew William, like her a Norman and of Viking descent, established a new dynasty and began a whole new period in England's history.
She writes well. She knows her subject, but keeps it light and carries us with her. There are family trees and a list of the Dramatis Personae with a potted biography for each one to make it easier for us, and there are vivid details which I will never forget. For instance:
Northern marriage traditionally took place by seizure: the prospective bride would be forcibly carried off and the union formally recognised once her abductor had paid a 'bride-price' to her relatives. If the wife subsequently committed adultery she would be severely punished – in some regions she risked being killed. No such limits were imposed on Scandinavian men. They were openly promiscuous and would often keep one or more concubine whose children they might choose to recognise, or not. From a Scandinavian man's perspective, sex was unlicensed and marriage existed principally for making alliances. And for the newly Christian Viking leaders, the recognition of two separate marriage practices, Christian and pagan – and two convenient possibilities of making alliances this way – was an open door to flagrant bigamy. As Emma was later to find out to her cost.
