Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
[ This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the “last” part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful.
On the surface level the poem is about King Alfred the Great, a pre-Hastings Anglo-Saxon king who has the twin qualities of being both legendary and real. There was certainly an actual King Alfred who really did fight a Viking lord named Guthrum and built the foundation needed for his grandson to form the Kingdom of England. He is considered the first English king, and is the only English monarch to be given the epithet “the Great”. At the same time he is also a figure of legend. They say he disguised himself as a wandering minstrel and played the harp for Guthrum in his own camp on the night before they would meet in battle. They also say he once accidentally burned a peasant woman’s cakes, and she, not knowing he was her king, chewed him out thoroughly (I’d expand on that, but that’s really the whole legend; one of those stories told to children that seem to have no moral or point).
