Ancient legend tells of an army of knights that will remain sleeping until the last days.
The knights are waking up.
A homeless man is stalked by a pale, wraithlike creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Maimed animals and a host of suicides cluster around a mountain in Scotland. And deep beneath the cobbled streets of Oxford, a malicious hoard besieges a hidden city.
Freya Reynolds is a university student with a touch of OCD and an obsession with myth and folklore. Daniel Tully is living rough on the streets of Oxford, waging a secret war against an enemy only he can identify. Years ago, they found themselves in a world few know is real. They have since gone their separate ways and tried to put that adventure behind them.
But the mythical world is now bleeding into our reality-a dark spiritual evil that is manifesting itself in forgotten corners of the British Isles. Alex Simpson is a Scottish police officer who specializes in hunting mythical creatures. Together, they must confront the past, the present, and points beyond to defeat the ultimate threat to humanity.
Nothing they’ve seen so far prepares them for what awaits . . . in The Realms Thereunder.
The CSFF Blog Tour is reviewing Ross Lawhead’s first book of a new series, The Realms Thereunder. The book opens with an excerpt of the poem The Ballad of The White Horse by G. K. Chesterton and one of the characters refers almost constantly to Alfred the Great. So I thought I would include a little about Alfred.
Alfred was an unlikely person to become the only English king to be called Great. The youngest son, he was not even supposed to inherit the throne of Wessex. But as king he did so much for his country — unified the Anglo-Saxons, fought and repelled the Danes, established a navy, set up a system of education and law and brought many of his enemies to Christianity. Benjamin Merkle has written an excellent history of Alfred entitled The White Horse King. I read this book shortly after I began blogging and reviewing books. You can read my review HERE. The book is highly readable — more like a story than dry history. So after you finish The Realms Thereunder and you want to know more about Alfred, pick up The White Horse King.
Sometimes the heroes of history are truly worthy of the golden reputations they carry.
King Alfred united Anglo-Saxon England against a Viking invasion, led the English into battle against the Danish hordes, created a renaissance of literature and the arts, reformed the legal system, and set the stage for a revival of Christian worship. But that’s not what made him great. Ben Merkle unravels the tale of how a great man came to power during one of the most difficult periods in English history, how he led his nation through them, and how he laid the groundwork for England’s coming triumphs on the global stage.
(I received both of these books for review and the opinions expressed are mine alone.)
Check out the posts of other participant on the CSFF tour:
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