elix Roe-Hall grew up in County Meath, Ireland, surrounded by the layered landscape of a country where the past is never quite buried beneath the present. From an early age he was drawn to the forgotten edges of medieval history - the peoples and political worlds that shaped Europe but left too few documents for mainstream history to recover easily. His particular passion is the early medieval period, when the post-Roman world was still deciding what it would become, and the peoples of the continental interior were building, destroying, and rebuilding forms of political life with a creativity and a violence that formal institutional history has struggled to capture. He writes to recover those worlds and the extraordinary individuals who moved through them.