Review: Everyday Life of the Barbarians by Malcolm Todd

Everyday Life of the Barbarians by Malcolm Todd

Let me get this out of the way right here in the first post. Some of the posts here will be book reviews. I have to compose an average of five professional quality book reviews per month in my real life. The book reviews here will be me speaking as I do in my personal life, noting the things I liked and disliked about a particular book. There will likely be cursing and a hell of a lot of prepositions. This book was a good one to start with, not only because I read it recently, but because it fits the profile of a book I would review in my professional life.

Now that we got that disclaimer out of the way, on to the review.

This book was a synthesis work of archaeology and anecdotal history published sometime in the early eighties, I'd guess. I'm too lazy to look it up, could've been late seventies. It focuses on Goths, Franks and Vandals from a hundred or two years prior to the fall of Rome all the way until the late Dark Ages. The shift in material and metaphysical culture that each of these groups underwent as a result of contact with Rome, the aftermath of defeating Rome, and then living in a Europe that was descending into madness are roughly outlined.

The book is only a couple hundred pages, so you're not getting an exhaustive work here by any means. What you do get is an uneven long form essay. I mentioned earlier that the book sits on two sides of a fence. One side of the fence is anecdotal history, the other side is archaeological analysis. When the two are used in tandem to discuss whatever the hell the topic is on any given page, the book is brilliant. It fails about half the time to do that, however. There are many tracts throughout the text that are either an ass hair away from Paul Bunyan style Tall Tales, or incredibly dry discussion of midden contents. The nice thing about presenting these two together is that you get a grounding effect that makes the history parts less outlandish and also serves to make the archaeological stuff more entertaining. I read archaeological texts for entertainment purposes and I find them boring a lot of the time. A layman would cry himself to sleep reading this stuff, and this book does a good job about half the time making it interesting. I'm not sure if another edition of this got published or not, but it would have benefited from an emphasis on blending the two expository styles together. Inside the dust jacket, you see that there is a whole series of "Daily Lives of x," so it's unlikely that an updated or revised version of this book was ever published.

Now to the meat. Franks were FUCKING BADASSES. I can honestly say that this was the biggest thing I took away from this book. The Franks used a medium-short length throwing lance that had a bunch of barbs on the tip. It was attached to a rope like they do with harpoons. In fact, the thing pretty much looks like a small land harpoon, for catching men. They scared the living shit out of Roman legionnaires. The mental image of a bunch of filthy, screaming Frenchmen bounding out of the woods throwing barbed lances that stick, are pulled out with ropes and rend the shit out of your torso on the way out is BRUTAL. A chapter towards the end of the book shows the evolution of the throwing lance and light armor that the Franks underwent during their battles with the failing Roman Empire. Up until around 400 AD nobody in Europe was wearing any kind of armor unless they were working for Rome or incredibly rich. Best part of the book, by far.

Sometime in the next few days I'll track the book down and scan some images that I liked.