Bully for him, you might think, and just who is Guy Halsall anyway? Well, he’s an historian specialising in the period I’m most interested in myself at the moment, Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages, who I first heard of being slagged off gently corrected by Peter Heather in his latest 1,000 page history, Empires and Barbarians for getting the impact of barbarian invasions on the Roman Empire All Wrong. So I had to read this fellow Halsall’s work for himself and found Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 one of the better one volume explorations of how the Western Roman Empire came to an end, his differences with Heather being one of degree rather than kind, as far as I could make out. In our always on, 24/7 wireless mobile internet connected world it should not come as a surprise a professional historian like Guy Halsall has a blog, but I still can’t take this for granted, especially not when it leads to posts like this, where Halsall examines why we are so wedded to barbarian invasions as explenation for the “Fall of Rome”:
The barbarian is the classic ‘subject presumed to’. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. ‘He’ is not like ‘us’, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians in the vision of Peter Heather, are peoples with ‘coherent aims’, which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well – none other than the barbarians anyway.
And finding Halsall’s blog (through a post from Nicola Griffith I should add) led inevitably to discovering a whole slew of likeminded blogs, now listed under “Science” in my blogroll. There are days when the internet looks small and dreary and all your usual blog friends are silent, not saying anything of interest. And then there are days when you cut around a corner and find whole vistas opening up. This is one of those days. It’s not any day I find four new brilliant blogs: Guy Halsall’s, Blogenspiel, Medieval History Geek and last but certainly not least, A Corner of Tenth Century History, where posts like this one make me very jealous and slightly in awe — why can’t I write like this?