Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St Gall Edited by Prof. a. J. Grant

Here are two radically different portraits of the same man. Einhard was Charlemagne's close friend and adviser, a courtier who lived in the emperor's household and knew the man behind the myth. His biography, written shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, offers an intimate, factual account of the ruler who united Western Europe and sparked the Carolingian Renaissance. Then there is Notker, the Monk of St Gall, composing his version roughly fifty years later, by which time legend had already begun to outpace memory. His account is embellished, miraculous, larger than life. Together these two texts do something remarkable: they show history becoming legend in real time. You see the same life rendered plain and the same life rendered magnificent, and you understand how medieval people remembered their greatest king. This is essential reading for anyone curious about how we construct the past, and what gets lost and gained when we do.