attila the hun book recommednation request

November 25, 2015 9:11 AM

Can I have a book recommendation about Attila that you have read?
posted by M83 to Education (3 answers total)

Best answer: I think the primary sources on Attila himself are not really very lengthy, so most secondary works probably tell similar stories. You could read those primary sources stitched together into one narrative in chapter 3 (~55 pages) of C. D. Gordon's The Age of Attila (1960), or you could hope for better context from secondary work that happens to be more recent or better written. One possibility is chapter 7 (~50 pages) of Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006), which at least has a lot of maps (and spends a further ~30 pages on the fall of the Hunnic Empire). I have no idea what an actual historian thinks about it though.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 1:26 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Are you talking about non-fiction? If so, I don't really have any suggestions on Attila specifically, but more about the last century or so of the Roman Empire after the death of Constantine. The thing about the Huns is that they were the instigators of a lot of what are thought of as "barbarian" invasions, but were actually significantly Romanized and/or Christianized groups (like the various Gothic factions, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards). There were a lot of shifting allegiances between these groups, the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, and even the Huns themselves. This means there's a lot of intertwined history before Attila is even born that makes the whole period worth looking into.

I can personally vouch for the Peter Heather suggestion from Monsieur Caution as a good start, if a bit dense at times. I'd also suggest for Mike Duncan's The History of Rome podcast, which I've listened to in its entirety, with episodes covering time period I mentioned starting at about 140 or so, and specifically focusing on the Huns from episodes 169 through 173. I've seen Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell mentioned a number of times in similar question in places like Reddit's AskHistorians sub, so you may also want to give that a spin. And as always, even though it's coming up on 250 years old and has a lot of out-of-date information, Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth a gander if you have access to it.

BTW, if the reason you're interested is because you're playing Attila: Total War, and you want to know more about some of the other groups (such as the Vandals or the Arabian kingdoms), I've got more suggestions.
posted by zombieflanders at 1:52 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: In fiction, there's a short novella: 'Hun' in the Anthony Burgess compilation The Devil's Mode. It's a psychological piece which loosely describes Attila's resentment of the late Roman Empire.
posted by ovvl at 4:40 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]