Given the violent and uncertain politics of the period, he was also almost certainly outstandingly able, intelligent, and brave. About how Godwin rose to such heights in the first instance, gaining Knut’s trust, we know little, although we can surmise he was indeed ambitious. Understandably, chroniclers in the Anglo-Norman period were not kind to Godwin, damning his and his dynasty’s ambition. History however is written by the winners, and three of Godwin’s sons, including King Harold, were killed at the Battle of Hastings when Duke William of Normandy won his cognomen William the Conqueror. We know he came from relatively humble beginnings, a thegn’s son, and was a pubescent hostage in the court of King Ethelred the Unrede, who exiled Godwin’s father. We know he was over-endowed with sons who proved troublesome even by C11th standards. We know he was an Anglo-Saxon magnate of extraordinary wealth and power, right-hand man in England to King Knut the Great, the Danish King of Denmark, Norway and England. There’s a lot on the historic record about Godwin, mostly about his adult life. It’s elegiac, lyrical, grand, high-minded centrally concerned with honour and male friendship, fathers and sons, duty, war and death. It’s a serious – and successful – attempt at telling the hero tale of Godwin, father of Harold, last Anglo-Saxon king of England, in a style that’s consciously, but not crudely, an homage to the genre of Germanic heroic lay. Guess what that's about.Shieldwall is a welcome surprise. His second novel was picked by the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph's Christmas Picks, won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Encore Award. His first novel was picked as one a Book of the Year in 2001 by the Washington Post, and won a Betty Trask Award, the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and a cup of tea with Valerie Elliot: widow of TS Elliot. Justin's other work has focused on China and Eritrea, in East Africa. The first of this series, Shieldwall, was picked as a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times.
Prize Winning novelist currently chronicling events surrounding the Battle of Hastings, in 1066.
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