One of my greatest heroes from history is King Alfred the Great, who lived in England in the 800s AD. He was a Saxon king who was a great warrior against the invading Vikings and a great scholar, who brought learning back from where it lapsed since the Saxons themselves invaded Roman England and destroyed that civilization. One of my greatest literary heroes is King Arthur, along with Merlin the wizard, Sir Gawain and the other knights of the Round Table. The Lost Dragon of Wessex brings together both of these heroes into a single story. Published by Gwendolyn Bowers in 1957, this book is a mixture of the historic and the fanciful but heavily weighted towards the historical. The delightful illustrations were done by Charles Geer, a renowned illustrator (e.g., the various Mad Scientists’ Club titles, the Alvin Fernald series, and the Miss Pickerell books).
The hero of the book is Wulf the Saxon lad, who longs to serve the great lord Alfred in his capital city of Winchester, located in what is now England but what was then the Saxon kingdom of Wessex. The King Arthur story threads are brought into the plot via the mysterious background of Wulf – he does not know who his father was, yet he was told to wait for his father to return one day. The struggle with the invading Vikings is part of the book’s background, which Wulf experiences as he succeeds in entering King Alfred’s service and gets to know this great king. The Saxon environment comes alive to the reader through the author’s judicious use of Saxon words and terminology. All in all, an excellent historical novel for the middle school and upper elementary levels.