Tolstoy, Nikolai

Count Tolstoy was born in 1935, and educated at Wellington College and Trinity College Dublin, where he gained an Honours degree in Modern History and Political Theory.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In October 1987 he was presented with the International Freedom Award by the United States Industrial Council Educational Foundation.

Tolstoy is currently head of the Tolstoy family, and holds Russian and British citizenship. He is married with four children, and lives in the countryside near Oxford.

Oldest British Prose Literature: The Compilation of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi

2009 0-7734-4710-5
Establishes the chronology and provenance of the early mediæval tales known today as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Although they have been justly described as ‘fundamentally the stories of the old Brittonic gods from whom the leading Welsh dynasties claimed descent’, which makes their principal subject-matter archaic and in principle timeless, Tolstoy shows that often seemingly incongruous and contradictory passages reflect details of historical events in Britain and Ireland during the first two decades of the eleventh century.