John R Green Book Review: "A brief history of the English"
Scandinavian, Roman, German, and French raids marked the primitive Pictish, Jute, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic enclaves found in the early history of the islands. Early generational maps and tables reflect the rise and decline of influence and dynastic successions. Indicatively, the names Great Britain and England find their nominative substance in the Angevin territories that straddle the channel, along with Brittany in western France.
In 1008 pages, the author reveals a brief history of the Anglo-Saxon; Tellingly, his introduction was written in 1888. With biographical assistance from ages far older than Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, or even Ovid, Green chronicles those influences that shape ethics, ethos, and law among English-speaking peoples. Candidly, he describes the cruelty, debauchery and sleight of hand associated with Britain’s rise as world leader; indeed, it was a reflection of mankind’s propensity for the coarse, vulgar, and licentious liberties common among those who used sword and mace to control equally undisciplined values. Although the kings and court of England are exposed in their most base appetites, Green comments: “I have called more attention to the religious, intellectual, and industrial progress of the nation itself than, to the best of my recollection, has ever been done in any previous history of the same magnitude..”
John Green died before his work could be fully published. To carry out his ambitious endeavor, his wife, Alice, worked to finish his huge construction.
The development of the expansive UK is drawn in laborious detail; Simultaneously, an introduction to English mechanics, in its purest form, can be read in this copious display of intellectuality. The book is highly recommended as an introduction to English skills; but amid such linguistic elegance, readers must endure the endless banality of the repeated power struggles and inconceivable cruelties of the age. Still, at over half a million words, the book represents a formidable history of English-speaking peoples.
Incongruously, we find Wyclif’s Bible translation efforts honored, along with Tyndale’s; however, there was no mention of the King James translation effort to design an ‘easy to understand’ book. King James, crude and unscrupulous as he was, was responsible for the most far-reaching literature to affect Anglo-Saxon minds, though the result did not in the least alleviate the mysteries of symbols and numbers in ancient Biblical and cryptographic accounts. Even now, those secret writings, unanswered for 2,000 years, remain hidden from all but the most studious exegete. Neglected in the King James translation, like the considerable King James effort that John Green neglected, these mysteries have been unraveled beyond doubt.
The only fault imputed to the considerable work of Mr. Green is his neglect of the only great literary work credited to the English-speaking peoples, the King James Holy Bible.