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M. J. Harper

The History of Britain Revealed Hardcover

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Language

English
Publisher

Nathan Carmody
ISBN-10

0954291107
ISBN-13

978-0954291105
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Product details

Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0954291107
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0954291105
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.9 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #9,078,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #905,873 in History (Books)

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C. Korbelle

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 17, 2018

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This author is so informative. I can't wait for his next book.

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G. Kochanski

A mix of ideas and puffery.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 2, 2008

It's a needlessly insulting little book, and at least partially incorrect. Still, it's an interesting book because it may be partially right.

I hope the right people read it, and manage to overlook the insults and errors.

1) His description of evolutionary biology and the problem of fossil ancestors is just uninformed. He makes the common error in assuming that we humans have evolved and improved, but our ancestral species have not. Then, he wonders "where our the ancestral species?"

Silly! The ancestral species have evolved too. It's basically symmetric: we and the apes both evolved from a common ancestor. We are as much the ancestral species of a chimpanzee as chimpanzees are our ancestors. The reason that ancestral species are not here any more is simply that all species change with time because their environments change and because of genetic drift.

Now, this is not the central point, but it's well known and has been well popularized by people like Stephen Gould, so
it's something that he should have known when writing the book. You then have to wonder what other errors there are?

2) He tells a story about how academics avoid dealing with inconsistencies in their data. It sounds plausible enough, and may even sometimes be partially true. But, academics are not just fat cats who are trapped in their boyhood myths. Most of us are curious and want to know what is really going on.

Most of us understand that conforming to the standard model is indeed a good way to live quietly and comfortably, but we also know that there is nothing better than breaking the standard model, if it can really be proven to be wrong.
The model breakers are the people who are remembered by history and the ones who get the juicy academic posts and prizes. The quiet people who conform may live comfortably, but they tend to live comfortably in second rate, out-of-the way institutions.

So, while there are forces for conformity in academia, there are also forces for revolution. If an academic discipline slides into slothful conformity, you can be sure it is because real proof is unobtainable, not because people are too blind to see it. If there were clear evidence, some ambitious junior lecturer would grab it, and use it.

So, don't take the book too seriously. It's probably wrong. Still, it has an interesting idea or two in there. Do we really know that the common people in AD 800 spoke Anglo-Saxon? Do we really know that in 55 BCE they spoke British (i.e. a Celtic language)? How do we know that they didn't speak something rather closer to modern English?

I don't know the answers, but I'll keep an eye open. Just in case he's right, it might give my career quite a boost.

7 people found this helpful

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T. Bachman

I love books like this

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 15, 2007

Short version: Buy this book.

Longer, but still pretty short, version:

I don't know who M.J. Harper is, but...in a strange sort of way, I don't really care (well, I do, but...I don't).

The bottom line is that his book is one spicy little zinger of a criticism of - well, the entire orthodox history of the British Isles, the entire orthodox history of the English language, the entire orthodox history of Spanish, Portugese, French, Italian, Romanian, Welsh, Irish, Scottish (and probably a few others I've forgotten about), and the academic disciplines of linguistics, history, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and philology. It's shocking, incisive, sometimes profane, gratuitously insulting, sarcastic, gleefully perverse, and I am torn between regarding it as wildly implausible, and disconcertingly convincing (I will be interested to read reviews of it by some of the conventional scholars he takes shots at).

Gotta run, just wanted to post this as I just finished the book.

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

John Edwards

Total Rubbish

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 2, 2022

Verified Purchase

No review, it wasn't worth the effort. Straight in the bin!

Amazon Customer

The art of pure reasoning...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 16, 2017

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Great to read such clarity of thought and reasoning. Many of the conclusions carry the ring of truth. Highly recommended reading.

3 people found this helpful

Martin A

Forget what you knew about the history of the English langauge.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 23, 2007

Verified Purchase

I had become curious about the origin of English, having read "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.

The standard history of the English Language has it that, before the arrival of the Normans, we were speaking Old English (Anglo Saxon) - a language as different from today's English as, say, modern German. Then, within a few hundred years, we were speaking the English of Chaucer - a language not differing very much from modern English, if changes in spelling are allowed for.

Bearing in mind the slow communication of those days, the non-existence of printing (and, for the majority, the absence of formal education), it seemed to me that for today's English to have:

- come into existence as a single language (regional differences notwithstanding)

- to be spoken everywhere from Exeter to Aberdeen

all in just the few hundred years following 1066, was hard to believe.

M J Harper explains that the standard history of the English language is a myth. In scathing terms he explains that academics work on the basis of the standard history of the English language being an established fact. But, if you ask for evidence of it being a fact, the answer is along the lines "Everyone knows that is how it happened. Now shut up".

Working on the principal that, it's better to assume that things have not changed much (unless there is firm evidence to the contrary) he concludes that, most likely:

- English was already being spoken when the Normans turned up, and did not change much after their arrival.

- English was already being spoken when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and did not change much after their arrival.

- Ditto all previous invasions and conquests, Roman included.

It's all plausible. Though I have to say that the stridency of the tone here and there gives me a feeling that maybe the conventional wisdom is being rubbished too strongly.

If you like books that give simpler explanations for things and give new ways of thinking about things, I think you will enjoy this book.

26 people found this helpful

Duncan Andrew

What if this is right?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 13, 2007

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This book is truly breathtaking in both the scope and the implications of its arguments. If Harper's thesis is correct then English is not just some Western branch of German but is the source of it. It is also the source of all the Romance languages, including Latin. Harper arrives at this conclusion by stunning logic. Where do our latinate words come from? The orthodoxy says the Normans, of course. We have perhaps one third of our vocabulary from French. Yet, looked at through Harper's eyes, the French have two thirds of their vocabulary from English! Our language is bigger. The reason? It's much older.

In terms of origins, then, English was spoken when Caesar arrived. It was also spoken by the builders of Stonehenge and probably arrived with the first inhabitants after the last Ice Age. The Celts colonised the fringes of our archipelago because they were later invaders and therefore are a different race to the English. Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish are their languages.

Phew, heady stuff! Interesting to read John Grigsby's views, his 'Beowulf and Grendel' is on my reading list. If Harper is right 'Beowulf' is a more recent forgery. Anglo-Saxon is not Old English, it's just Anglo-Saxon and is a different language, that of a small ruling elite who came after the Romans.

How does all this sit with modern genetics? We know, because of Walter Bodmer's latest research, that genes for red hair are found on the fringes, so they are our 'Celts'. We also know that, according to David Miles, we share 80% of our DNA with the first inhabitants of our islands, so they are our English. Though the data varies in different parts of the country, there is also a strong overlay of immigrant DNA from the continent, particularly in the East of the country. This is probably our Anglo-Saxon and Danish ancestry (remember, blondes are a minority in our population; most of us have darker hair). Confusing? Try the book.

How do we resolve this? Academia will probably see Harper's thesis as total nonsense but it needs addressing. I'm going to read Stephen Oppenheimer's book on the same subject next. Maybe he can help...

13 people found this helpful

Ross

Starts off well, then goes horribly wrong.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 23, 2007

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The review by 'Spence' sums up a lot of the problems with this. The core idea of the book, that English was spoken in Britain long before the Anglo Saxons arrived is an interesting theory and one that is not unique to M.J. Harper. Much of the traditional story is problematic and Harper raises some interesting problems with the idea that Anglo Saxon completely replaced English, the lack of Celtic place names in England, the fact that Scotland has been largely English speaking for a long time despite having only briefly been under Angle control in the South East of the country. In fact the first third of the book, 60 pages or so, very ably makes this point.

In the latter two thirds Harper makes ever more extravagant claims with very little corroborating evidence on subjects as diverse as Geology, Evolution, Ancient Greeks and the history of language more generally. On some of these subjects I can't judge his competence but where I do understand the subject he comes across as rather ill informed, for example claiming that Mitochondrial DNA ought to show the most variation not at the origin of humanity but instead at the point where mankind has travelled furthest to reach.

The genial humour he displays in the early section of the work descends into witless sniping about the orthodoxy who simply cannot handle the truth. By the end of the last chapter it feels like being stuck in a lift with the pub bore.

As it is, 'The History of Britain: Revealed' is an non peer reviewed work making extraordinary claims without extraordinary proof thus despite the fascinating forst 60 pages it belongs on a par with the works of Graham Hancock.

32 people found this helpful

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The History of Britain Revealed Hardcover

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