Getting A Word In: Contact, Etymology and English Vocabulary in the Twelfth Century
This lecture explored the etymologies, meanings and contexts of some key words from this crucial time, as a way to think about the evidence for contact and change at the boundary of Old and Middle English and to illustrate how rich, diverse, challenging and surprising its voices can be.
Book Review: Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Headley fuses Old English language and poetry devices with contemporary idiom and slang.
‘Now Flying over the Hell-mouth’: The Gap Between St Guðlac and Nordic Volcano Imagery
This investigation into the effects of landscape and place on apocalyptic literature contrasts the portrayal of demonic flights over a hell-mouth with Norse volcanic imagery.
Mægð Modigre or Þeodnes Mægð: Judith’s Heroism in the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Judith
The Old English Judith tells the story of a Jewish virgin whose people, the Bethulians, are subjugated under the Assyrian King Holofernes by the orders of the great King Nebuchadnezzar.
The Emergence of the English – a new interpretation and an old conundrum
In the past decade or so a number of works have taken a fresh look at post-Roman Britain, in particular at the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in what is now England
Why Is English So Weird?
The English language is notoriously difficult to learn and to spell. In this episode of The Medieval Podcast, Danièle talks about the medieval roots of English and how it got to be so weird.
A literary history of the ‘Soul and Body’ theme in medieval England
This theme is preserved and developed in several medieval English texts, both in prose and verse, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Breaking with tradition(?): Female representations of heroism in Old English poetry
The characters of Grendel’s mother, Judith, and Juliana serve as primary examples for this analysis. This dissertation identifies these three figures as exhibiting a heroic ethos, explores how they fit into and deviate from the defined Old English heroic ideal
A Lifeʼs Worth: Reexamining Wergild in the Anglo-Saxon Royal Law Codes (c. 600-1035)
In the wide and growing world of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, wergild has an at once ubiquitous and spectral presence.
Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study
This article aims to present a preliminary study of the various uses of mann as attested in Old English prose, particularly in its surprisingly consistent use by an individual author, namely that of the ninth-century Old English Martyrology.
The Insular Landscape of the Old English Poem The Phoenix
The Old English poem The Phoenix, found in the Exeter Book (fols. 55b–65b), describes the mythical bird, the Edenic landscape it inhabits and the cycle of death and rebirth that it enacts in an extended Christian allegory.
Powerful Patens in the Anglo-Saxon Medical Tradition and Exeter Book Riddle 48
This article discusses Exeter Book Riddle 48 in light of its proposed solutions.
Baptism in Anglo-Saxon England
This thesis examines the lexical field of baptism in Old English. The lexical development of the field and the semantic development of the individual lexemes were evaluated: the verbs fulwian, cristnian, depan, dyppan, and the vocabulary for baptismal water in Old English. At every stage of the project, the linguistic data was correlated to theological, liturgical and cultural backgrounds.
The Ruin: The Past Dreaming of the Past
Besides being chillingly beautiful, this is one of those fantastic moments for literature scholars in which, by describing what life might have been like in a former time, the poet reveals something of his own age: what people of his time thought glory days should be like.
BOOK REVIEW: Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife by Susan Signe Morrison
Grendel’s Mother tells the story of Brimhild, a child found abandoned in a boat on the shores of Denmark. Taken in by a…
Senses of the Past: The Old English Vocabulary of History
How did the Anglo-Saxons think about history?
Hostages in Old English Literature
Hostages in Old English Literature examines the various roles that hostages have played in Anglo-Saxon texts, specifically focusing on the characterization of Æscferth in The Battle of Maldon.
Book Review: Drout’s Quick and Easy Old English
It may seem a little incredible that anyone would need a textbook to learn an older version of his or her mother tongue, but learning Old English (Anglo-Saxon) takes some time and effort – and a good textbook.
Riddles in the Dark Ages
Latin riddles depended on knowledge of a specific subject in order to be deciphered, while English riddles were often about common things like the weather.
The Old English Translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in its Historical and Cultural Context
Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (HE), written c. 731, enjoyed a great popularity among the Anglo-Saxons and Carolingians and was one of the most popular texts in medieval Europe.
The Anglo-Saxon War-Culture and The Lord of the Rings: Legacy and Reappraisal
The literature of war in English claims its origin from the Homeric epics, and the medieval accounts of chivalry and the crusades.
The Anglo-Saxon runic poem: a critical reassessment
I consider the runic poem in its most basic form, as a runic alphabet, and compare its runes and rune-names with the other Anglo-Saxon runic material collected in the Thesaurus.
The Hero’s Journey: Beowulf, Film, and Masculinity
Beowulf is one of many examples of a story that employs the rhetoric of the hero. The plight of the main character Beowulf is the focus of the tale, and the tasks that he must overcome throughout the course of the poem provide insight into the development of the character of the hero.
Judith in Late Anglo-Saxon England
Judith makes two spectacular appearances in the Old English corpus: she is the brave heroine of a poem which is included in one of the most famous manuscripts of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the Nowell Codex, which also contains the heroic epic, Beowulf.