Reading in ‘Lord of the Rings': Part I

The following ruminations have their origin in an explanation of the epithet ‘Unready’ given to the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred that I encountered in Eleanor Parker’s excellent A Short History of the Danish Conquest: Æthelred has gone down in history as the ‘unready’, an epithet which was not, in origin, a comment on his preparedness, but on an irony of […]