Anglo-Saxon Archive
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“The Wrath of the Northmen”: The Vikings and their Memory
Posted on March 2, 2013 | No CommentsThese raiding peoples emerge out of all three Scandinavian homelands--Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--sending off their young men all over the known world in search of wealth and prestige. -
Horses for Courses? Religious Change and Dietary Shifts in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsThe spread of Christianity across England over the course of the Anglo-Saxon period brought new worldviews, ways of acting and dietary habits. -
Why did the English people stop eating horses in the Middle Ages?
Posted on February 20, 2013 | No CommentsPeople living in Anglo-Saxon England were turned off the idea of eating horses once they became Christian as they believed it was ‘pagan’ food, argues a new research paper. -
Riding To The Afterlife: The Role Of Horses In Early Medieval North-Western Europe
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsIn order to establish the role of horses in the pre-Christian religions of Anglo-Saxon England, Viking-Age Scandinavia and other Germanic regions in mainland Europe, this dissertation will look for evidence of burial, sacrifice and other rituals involving horses in both archaeological and literary sources -
Edith of Wessex, Queen of England
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsWe would like examine the life of a woman who was a contemporary of Queen Emma, Queen Matilda and mentor of Saint Margaret of Scotland. -
The speaking cross, the persecuted princess and the murdered earl: the early history of Romsey Abbey
Posted on February 5, 2013 | No CommentsThe Old-English note may have begun life as an endorsement, either to the grant of privileges or (what is perhaps more likely) to the agreement about the woodland belonging to Romsey, a notice of which has become attached to it; it was not uncommon when diplomas were collected into cartularies for such endorsements to be used as ‘headings’ for the text. -
The British Kingdom of Lindsey
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsThe first piece of evidence which offers support for the above contention comes from the kingdom-name ‘Lindsey’ itself. Two forms of this name exist in Anglo-Saxon sources, reflecting two different Old English suffixes:6 Lindissi (later Lindesse, as used by Bede and the earliest manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)7 and Lindesig... -
The Frankish Annals of Lindisfarne and Kent
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsScholars interested in the processes by which the history of Early Anglo Saxon England came to be recorded have long known of the existence of the annals that are referred to here as 'The Frankish Annals of Linidisfarne and Kent'. -
Edward the Confessor, King of England
Posted on January 29, 2013 | No CommentsHe was upstanding and pious, making him a cut above some of the ruthless and treacherous men around him. -
The Anglo-Saxons in Leicestershire
Posted on January 23, 2013 | No CommentsThe introduction of fieldwalking to the county came in the late 1970s, but at this stage the small and fragile early Anglo-Saxon potsherds were not recognised in the field. No one was claiming to have found sites of this period. In fact, it was often claimed that it could not be done. It would be very useful and interesting to re-examine all of the potsherds found during the early years, looking for previously unidentified early Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Iron Age pottery. -
Emma of Normandy, Queen of England
Posted on January 22, 2013 | No CommentsIn reading about the successors of Alfred, I came across a Queen, Emma, who really intrigued me. It was because of her, the course of English history was sent into a completely different direction. -
Aethelred the Unready
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsCalling Aethelred 'Unraed' could mean he was given bad counsel, he did not take advice from his counselors or that he himself was unwise. Perhaps all were true. Let’s look at the story and see. -
Questioning the Accepted Techniques for Sword-Forging in Anglo-Saxon England and in Frankish Europe
Posted on January 14, 2013 | No CommentsFrankish swords were absolutely crucial to the rise of the Carolingian empire and they played a major role in Afro-Eurasian commerce during this period. -
Holding The Border: Power, Identity, And The Conversion Of Mercia
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsExamining the conversion of the kingdom of Mercia from the perspective of that kingdom’s origins and development and its rulers’ interests and concerns will enable us to understand both resistance and conversion to Christianity in seventh-century England. -
More pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard discovered
Posted on January 5, 2013 | No CommentsThe Staffordshire Hoard has now grown by a further 81 pieces, after a Coroner's Court declared yesterday that the newly found objects were part of the Anglo-Saxon treasure. -
Matrimonial politics and core-periphery interactions in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Scotland
Posted on December 31, 2012 | No CommentsThe medieval kingdom of Scotland was a rich amalgam of diverse ethnic elements which reflected the turbulent history of the first millennium of its development. -
A Christological reading of The Ruin
Posted on December 30, 2012 | No CommentsWe should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings. -
The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ's cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself. -
England: One Country, Two Courts
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe tension created by the two-court system is an integral part of England’s administrative and constitutional history. Exactly how integral has generated a considerable amount of scholarly work, from explanations of the sources of the conflict, to how the disagreement over jurisdiction was addressed throughout the Middle Ages, to what impact the issue had in shaping England’s overall political development. -
St Edmund of East Anglia and his miracles: variations in literature and art
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsEdmund was said to have been crowned at the age of just fourteen years by St Humbert on 25 December 855 in the then royal capital Burna, (probably Bures St Mary, Suffolk). Almost nothing is known of his life and reign, though he was recorded as a just and uncompromising ruler, the embodiment of the Greek ideal of the kalòs kai agathòs – that is, the right balance of the Good and the Beautiful, the combination of virtues that could create the perfect nobleman. -
The Murder of St. Wistan
Posted on December 18, 2012 | No CommentsThere is more than one ghost story connected with the quiet hamlet of Wistow, which lies off the London road about seven miles from Leicester. -
An Ecoritical Approach to Chaucer. Representations of the Natural World in the English Literature of the Middle Ages
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe choice to write and present a study of nature in medieval English literature from an ecological perspective has been originated by a personal interest in the urgency of the deep environmental crisis we are faced with and by the drive to expand the eco- oriented study of representations of nature in literature to chronological and spatial areas well beyond those originally typical of ecological criticism. -
Tolkien’s Heroic Criticism: A Developing Application of Anglo-Saxon Ofermod to the Monsters of Modernity
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsThe structure of this study follows the development of Tolkien’s social criticism and heroic aesthetic. The study begins by looking at some biographical elements of Tolkien’s life and how those elements shaped the creation of Tolkien’s anti-hero, the Hobbit. -
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsJ. R. R. Tolkien's classic work on the Old English poem -
”Beowulf” and the Influence of Old English on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Posted on December 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe Lord of the Rings is set in the fictional but incredibly vast and detailed universe of Middle-Earth. Tolkien has put great effort in developing an impossibly gigantic realm peopled by many diverse races. Of the immeasurable number of characters and locations present in Tolkien’s work, many bear a name deeply rooted in Old English.
