The wake

What Hacker News says

1. 6502nerdfaceMay 2023
   If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 novel The Wake. It's written in a sort of de-latinized English and tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon freeman living through the Norman conquest in the Lincolnshire Fens, where much of the local economy was about catching eels. The initially far-off events of 1066 eventually make their effects felt at home, and he organizes a guerilla-like insurgency against the Normans. It's entertaining historical fiction, but more than that, the writing is truly high art, which left an impression me, not unlike Gene Wolfe.
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2. luxpirOct 2021
   It's good, isn't it. There are some stellar Reddit, Discord and Youtube communities forming around OE. All intertwined really. That crossover period is really understudied. At least by me. A great book is The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, in a pseudo/shadow English about the English resistance to Norman incursion.
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3. shooApr 2019
   If you're open to a bit of interesting fiction, _The Wake_ by Paul Kingsnorth is a post apocalyptic novel set after the Norman invasion of 1066. Kingsnorth wrote the book in an invented version of old english:

   https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/27232308-the-wake

   Here's Kingsnorth writing about the consequences of the Norman invasion upon England today:

   > [...] legacies of 1066 remain with us. Take that law enacted by Guillaume in 1067. In Anglo-Saxon England, the idea that one man — the king — literally owned the entire landbase of the nation would have been unthinkable. Today, it remains a legal reality: England is still owned, as a whole, by the Crown. The hereditary monarchy introduced by the Normans remains too, and the French concept known as ‘primogeniture’ — in which estates are inherited wholesale by the first-born son, rather than parceled out between children as was more common in Anglo-Saxon England

   > [...] Today, Britain is the country with the second most unequal distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the land is owned by fewer than two per cent of the population. Much of this is directly traceable to Guillaume, whose 22nd-great-granddaughter sits on the English throne today.

   > [...] ask yourself whether the development of early modern capitalism in England would have been possible without that concentration of land, and therefore power and wealth. What about the consequent empire? Did the industrial revolution begin in England because that funnel of power and money made it possible? Or what about class, which is directly connected to all of those things? We are still one of the most socially and economically stratified countries in Europe. In today’s England, the rulers still drink wine and the ‘plebs’ still drink beer, just as they did in 1066.

   https://aeon.co/essays/why-1066-wasn-t-all-that-england-s-en...

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4. holowireMar 2019
   I actually just picked up 'The Wake' a couple of weeks ago. There is definitely a learning curve to Kingsnorth's "shadow tongue," but once you get the hang of it, it is very immersive and rewarding to read. It really gives you a sense of foreign place and time, as a story set in 1066 should. What surprised me is how effective it is at establishing a perspective from which you can really feel the relationship that these characters have with the world around them. I picked it up because the premise sounded interesting, and was totally blown away with how fun it is to read—I would definitely recommend checking it out.
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5. shooJul 2017
   i remember feeling outrage when i first realised just by being born in a country one is subject to the country's laws. completely non-consensual.

   tangentially: book recommendation: "The Wake" by Paul Kingsnorth. fictional account of life in England following the Norman invasion of 1066, written in a unique form of english. Here's the part I am reminded of - the narrator is enraged when the local official comes to his land to collect tax for the conquering foreign king:

   > well i wolde not gif them geld no i wolde not gif naht to this ingenga bastard for what he done. i had naht to gif after all the wars and the fyr what had cum from him and these cyngs all feohtan ofer the right to play with small folc lic sum fuccan game and this is what i telt the fuccan weosul when he cum to me for geld

   on another hand, now i slowly appreciate the "tragedy of the commons". oh to live in a world where nothing i did impacted anyone else, and nothing they did impacted me. how simple and independent and free we could all be. but the world is not like this, and becomes even less like this as time passes.

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6. beschizzaOct 2016
   To recap:

   - there might have been more interest in the early English kings.

   - 11th c England would be darker to history, because there wouldn't be a Doomsday Book.

   - Harold II would have a great-king reputation for beating Tostig, Hardrada and William.

   - England would have remained politically chaotic, including ...

   - A likely civil war between Harold II and his own relatives.

   Not addressed:

   - Changes to English society and life. Would feudalism have been imported anyway?

   - No diaspora of English nobility, many of whom left rather than become subject to Normans

   Paul Kingsnorth's novel The Wake is an intriguing historical novel imagining how the Norman conquest affected everyday English folk.

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