The King Liveth

UK Publisher: Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Ltd. (London). First published 1943

During the dark years of the Ninth Century, when all seemed lost, and when so many English people were sunk in dejection and grief, we see King Alfred, known to-day, and properly so, as Alfred the Great, trying to inspire his people with hope and courage, rallying his forces, and stimulating them into activity, and himself working hard in many ways to rescue his country from the plight into which it had been allowed to blunder.

King Alfred, the Great Deliverer, who achieved the apparently impossible feat of freeing Wessex from the powerful and in other ways very capable Danes, lives in these pages, in association with a large number of other characters; and the incidents, striking and interesting, lead at last to the crowning victory at Ethandune, the modern Edington, near Westbury, in Wiltshire

Although in these stirring chapters there is much fighting, we are not always in the thick of battle, because the love interest is strong also; and the moving scenes are varied by the pleasing coming and going of noble, amiable and beautiful women. with ardent and tender wooing, sometimes in the moonlit forest; for just as Scott, in Ivanhoe, has given us engaging scenes in Sherwood Forest, so has Jeffery Farnol brought romance into the Forest of Selwood. that, in the time of Alfred, curved along the frontier of Somerset. under the chalk upland of Wiltshire.

The many readers of Jeffery Farnol's books know how attached he is to rural scenes, and to a life in the woods and fields and villages and country lanes and this love is revealed once more in this his latest book, in which we may listen again to the singing of the birds. and to the music of the running streams as a welcome change from the clash of swords, and the hoarse shouts of warriors.