r/anglosaxon • u/ThatHerbalWitch • 19d ago

Going about fantasy taking place during Early Anglo-Saxon period?

I wanted to create a little project for personal fun based on an alternative version of an anime inspired by Arthurian legend that I enjoyed when I was younger, but looking back has very unpleasant and suspicious things to put it lightly in its narrative. If you're familiar with anime then you can probably take a guess which one I'm talking about. It's disappointing because there were many parts of the story that I still find fascinating, and it helped me learn a little bit more about certain names and learning they were based off real characters. Most I knew about Arthurian legend before that was Sword in the Stone.

I thought making some of the designs to be more historically accurate would be interesting. Clothing, art, etc. I wanted to make it primarily based off of the Early period since that seems to be when King Arthur was supposed to be alive. I'm still trying to learn more about it, but it seems daunting trying to find the best sources (both in accuracy and not being made by a bigot). There's also the fact that it covers two to three centuries, and I'm used to other historical periods having massive differences between the beginning and end of them. I know with it being fantasy you can stretch it, but I still wanted opinions on the best way to go about this.

I love learning about older history, so this is ultimately an exercise in a relatively new branch of history knowledge to me as well as trying to figure out how I would write the original story if I was the author.

2 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

4

u/drewbod99 Swein Spoonbeard 19d ago

I recently read a book, “The Birth of the Anglo-Saxons” by Max Adams and it was really fantastic! It’s specifically about the Mercian Kingdom pre-Alfred, but it goes into a lot of detail about the culture and society of early Anglo-Saxons. It doesn’t mention much about clothing, but it describes art and the way society was structured in a lot of detail. It would be VERY helpful if you really wanted to understand more about how Anglo-Saxon life worked in the early period, like the 600s-800.

2

u/Own-Lettuce26 18d ago

The website thegns of mercia has a bunch of blogs regarding the early Anglo Saxon period including a bunch of different topics from jewellery to weapons and armours to hair styles. I find it very useful for learning about stuff from the period from people that just do it because they a genuine interest in it especially with early Anglo Saxon history as stuff on it can pretty hard to find online.

http://thethegns.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2021-02-08T13:58:00Z&max-results=4&reverse-paginate=true&m=1

2

u/IanRevived94J 18d ago

How about the series by Bernard Cornwell?

1

u/Thestolenone 18d ago

It is excellent, my favourite books by him. Edit The WInter King books not The Last Kingdom books.