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Listening for the Vikings: Some Evidence from Etymology
Posted on May 18, 2013 | No CommentsThe Vikings left behind several kinds of evidence during their stay in Anglo-Saxon England. Richard Dance notes that 'one crucial aspect is the etymological.' -
Visualization in Medieval Alchemy
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsTherefore, rather than attempting to establish an exhaustive inventory of visual forms in medieval alchemy or a premature synthesis, the purpose of this article is to sketch major trends in visualization and to exemplify them by their earliest appearance so far known. -
Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction. -
Old English and the lexicography of Old High German
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsIn this lecture I will focus on how Old English affected the early German written record and on the difficulties of its lexicographical description. -
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsUntil recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language. -
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsTime and again the Beowulf poet's choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found. -
Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThe first documented evidence of a Jewish presence in Slovenia dates from the 13th century, when Yiddish- and Italian-speaking Jews migrated south from Austria to Maribor and Celje, and east from Italy into Ljubljana. This is a good three centuries after the first mention of Jews in the Austrian lands. -
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsHow do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions -
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
Posted on March 10, 2013 | No CommentsThe linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism. -
Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Posted on March 9, 2013 | No CommentsBernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin. -
Celtic Search Talk III: Irish Classical Studies and the Irish History of Troy
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis was part of a series of papers given at the University of Toronto in competition for a position in the Celtic Studies department. This paper focused on the reception of literature and the reception of the classics in medieval Ireland. -
Widows in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsOwing to a fairly large number of mainly vernacular codes of law that have survived, we are in a position to see at least how in legislation the position of women in general, but also of widows in particular, was defined. -
The Old English Rune Poem – Semantics, Structure, and Symmetry
Posted on February 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England. -
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... -
Awkward Adolescents: Male Maturation in Norse Literature
Posted on January 25, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough medieval masculinities have become a subject of scholarly interest, there has been relatively little discussion of the transition in Old Norse until very recently. -
The Scandinavian element beyond the Danelaw
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe present paper concentrates on the Scandinavian element present in Eng- lish in the area beyond the Danelaw, i.e. in the West Midlands and Southern parts of the country. -
The Development of Predicative Possession in Slavic Languages
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsAs an active language, Early Proto-Indo-European (Pre-Indo-Euro- pean) had no category of syntactic transitivity (Subject-Object relation), which is the central characteristic of nominative (accusative) languages, and no verb ‘have’. -
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. -
The History of English in Ten Minutes
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsLearn where words like house, loaf, bishop, font, drag, die, jury, justice, swine, mutton, pork, eyeball and alligator came from! -
Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsUnfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O'Curry - O'Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work. -
Tolkien’s Imaginary Languages
Posted on December 13, 2012 | No CommentsTolkien's extensive knowledge of world languages both ancient and modern lent itself to his creation of the artificial languages that add so much realistic depth to his fictional writing -
Language and Legend in the Fantasy Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsThere was something so real in the languages that he created, and critics wanted to find the inspirations behind Tolkien‘s worlds. Elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and various other creatures occupied the pages of his books, but the languages he created were complex and had real elements in them. Examples of his invented languages were those spoken by the Elves, Sindarin and Quenya. -
”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. -
The Knighting of Henry, son of William the Conqueror, in 1086
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII: Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century, at the Haskins Conference at Boston College.