Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic

Call for Papers: Transmission, Translation and Dissemination in the European Middle Ages, 1000 - 1500

2012-02-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

Closing date for proposals: 31st March 2012

Transmission, Translation and Dissemination in the European Middle Ages, 1000–1500 AD
University College Cork, Ireland
28th – 29th September 2012

The Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland, in association with Dr Elizabeth Boyle, University of Cambridge, are delighted to announce a forthcoming conference.

Transmission, Translation and Dissemination in the European Middle Ages, 1000–1500 AD, is an interdisciplinary, international, two-day conference to be held at University College Cork on 28–29 September 2012. This conference will explore the issues of textual transmission and the movement of ideas across medieval Europe. Indeed, going beyond consideration of literary texts alone, the scope of discussions will include the transmission of images, music, scientific learning, and related areas.

Keynote addresses will be given by Dr Caoimhín Breatnach, School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics, University College Dublin, on the transmission of Latin religious texts in Ireland c. 1000 - 1500; and Dr Anthony Lappin, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, University of Manchester, on Alchoran latinus and growing knowledge of Islam in the twelfth century.

Proposals (max. 250 words) are welcome from researchers in all areas of medieval studies. Papers should last c. 30 minutes (plus time for questions and discussion). We also welcome proposals from postgraduate students for shorter papers (c. 20 minutes plus questions). A small number of postgraduate bursaries may be available.

Proposals for papers should be emailed to: medrenforum@gmail.com no later than 31 March 2012. Registration details to follow. The call for papers is available as a PDF at this link.

This conference is being organised by the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland in association with University College Cork and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge. The conference is generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the School of History, and the School of English, University College Cork.

Organizing committee:
Dr Elizabeth Boyle (University of Cambridge)
Dr Ann Buckley (Trinity College Dublin)
Dr Carrie Griffin (Queen Mary, University of London / University College Cork)
Ms Emer Purcell M.Phil. (University College Cork)

In search of Carn Droma: exploring the boundaries between Picts and Gaels

2012-02-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

Philip Dunshea writes:

‘Reconnaissance walking’ is seen by modern archaeologists as a preliminary technique before proper field-surveying gets under way: a fairly casual way of assessing whether a site is worth investigating. But for much of the twentieth century it was a big part of the business for many medievalists. The list of the great walkers is a long one but honourable mention must go to O.G.S. Crawford and Margaret Gelling.

Gelling, a toponymist who eventually became president of the English Place-Name Society, spent countless hours bush-whacking across woodlands and fields, tracking contour lines and fluvial patterns, all in an effort to make herself as familiar with the intricacies of the English landscape as her beloved Anglo-Saxons must have been. Crawford, meanwhile, was wrapped up in what he believed was a personal crusade to survey and catalogue Britain’s heritage before it was swept away forever by modernity. Crawford knew that history and maps were inseparable, and as the Ordnance Survey’s first History Officer, he was well placed to follow this conviction. One of his lasting contributions to archaeology was in pioneering the use of aerial photography. To both Gelling and Crawford the legacy of the past (pre-historic, Roman and medieval) was there to be read in the landscape.

Over the last few decades, in common with every other academic discipline, early-medieval archaeology and early-medieval history have become so specialised in their own right that it’s now almost impossible to maintain an expert presence in both fields. Nowadays most historians in the ASNC line of work restrict themselves to libraries, largely because they’re dependent on work by philologists and other people who know more about the source-texts than they do. Archaeologists (or the dwindling cohort of archaeologists who don’t yet work in laboratories) have the great outdoors to themselves.

This seems neither fair nor justified. In the early medieval period the lie of the land must have had a vastly greater impact on day-to-day life than it does for us today. In many ways the texts studied by ASNaCs are just as rooted in the physical environment as any material remains, and this was brought home by some recent work I’ve been doing on the early-medieval significance of Scotland’s watershed divide. The research was all supposed to be focussed on a topographical feature called Druim Alban (the ‘Ridge’ or the ‘Spine of Alba’) which was understood to mark the frontier between the Picts (in the east) and the Scots of Dál Riata (in the west). In all contexts it is clear that the term refers to a mountain range – but which one?

Druim Alban (photo credit: Philip Dunshea)

Adomnán, abbot of Iona in the later seventh century, writes that his predecessor Columba had to travel ‘beyond the mountains of Druim Alban’ on his way to evangelise the Picts. That meant crossing from Iona, and the coastlands of the Firth of Lorne, to the Pictish heartlands of the east. Then when the northern Pictish kingdom of Fortriu fell out of love with the Columban clergy in the early eighth century, the latter were sent into exile beyond Druim Alban. Even centuries later, when Dál Riata and the Picts had coalesced to form the kingdom of Alba (later Scotland), Druim Alban was still a famous landmark. In the twelfth-century law code Leges Scocie, it was used to delimit the inner sanctum of the Scottish crown’s legal authority – west of Druim Alban, defendants and their warrantors were given longer to reach the southern courts.

Unfortunately none of this makes Druim Alban’s location any the clearer. Modern historians have tended to work round the problem by taking the term as referring to the whole of the Highlands; but for it to function as a legal and a national frontier, Druim Alban must have had a more precise significance. Close examination of some old maps and a bit of phenomenology suggest that the most likely candidate is actually the line of the watershed divide, which can be traced running through the mountains north from Loch Lomond to the Great Glen. To this day the county line of Argyll follows the watershed for much of its length (and Argyll, ‘coastland of the Gael’, represents the core of early-medieval Dál Riata). To the east of the divide is the basin of the Tay, the great river which drains almost all of the eastern Central Highlands into the North Sea; to the west, all streams flow down into the Firth of Lorne and the North Atlantic. To get from Dál Riata to Pictland, in other words, all you had to do was follow the rivers uphill and then down again. In the days before roads and railways came to the Highlands, it’s not hard to imagine how the watershed could have functioned as a visible frontier and a useful navigational marker.

Perhaps the most important route to cross the divide was that which followed the Tay up to its headwaters in Breadalbane, and then dropped down to Loch Awe and the sea beyond. Up until the early twentieth century this was marked by a famous cairn called Carn Droma (‘Cairn of the Spine’). Carn Droma is first mentioned in a fourteenth-century charter (where it is linked specifically with Druim Alban) and figures prominently on most of the early maps of Scotland. After the 1880s, however, it disappears from the maps; beyond one mention in a 1920s guidebook, Carn Droma has been quietly forgotten.

At this point Crawford or Gelling would surely have gone on a reconnaissance field-walk – so that is what I did. Along with me came a geologist, presumably well qualified to tell the difference between a cairn and a large pile of rocks. Our field-walk was just that – a tramp around a rough hillside. And Carn Droma is still there, buried deep in the woods above the little Highland village of Tyndrum, and still bang-on the line of the watershed divide. The old route from Pictland to Dál Riata is still there too, now marked by the A85 and the Glasgow to Oban railway. The cairn itself – which may date back to the Bronze Age – is heavily scarred by ploughing and in a fairly dilapidated state, but it remains a special spot. From here you can gaze west down into Argyll and Columba’s domain; to the east, through the trees, are the twin tops of Ben More and Stob Binnein, the rough bounds of Breadalbane and the lands of the Picts. Proof, if anything, that field-walking is still a worthwhile pursuit. Go and see for yourselves.

Carn Droma (photo credit: Philip Dunshea)

East to Ben More, Stob Binnein, and the Picts (photo credit: Philip Dunshea)

Giant squid spotted in Iceland?

2012-01-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

ASNC lecturer in Scandinavian History, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, recently found the following notice in a medieval Icelandic annal:

1345: A strange thing appeared east in Lagarfljót and the Fljóts Dale district, and people know that it was alive. Sometimes it looked like large islands but sometimes it shoots up coils and gaps in between, and many hundreds of fathoms long. No-one knew the size of it, and neither a head nor a fishtail has been seen on it, and for this reason people do not know what [kind of a] wonder it was.

The Icelanders were familiar with ordinary fish and marine mammals, but this creature was new to them. On the basis of the reference to 'coils', Dr Rowe at first was reminded of the Loch Ness Monster, but on further reflection a giant squid seemed more likely. Dr Rowe is currently at work on producing the first English translation of the medieval Icelandic annals, and further unsual events are sure to turn up.

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giant_squid_logy_bay.png

Junctions and Crossroads: Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic 2012

2012-01-26T05:52:00.000-08:00

The 2012 Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will take place on 25th February. This year's Colloquium theme is 'Junctions and Crossroads'. The keynote speaker will be Dr Barbara Crawford O.B.E., Honorary Reader at the University of St Andrews, who will speak on 'The Joint Earldoms of Caithness and Orkney'. Papers will be delivered by postgraduate students from home and abroad. Full registration details are available here - registration costs just £5 including lunch! The final programme is now available here. There will be a bookstall offering discounted titles from CUP, Yale University Press, Brepols and others.

The Colloquium will be followed by the annual Colloquium Dinner, which will be held this year at Trinity Hall. Prices are £30 for the vegetarian menu or £35 for the meat option. The full menu, including drinks reception and three courses, is attached to the registration form. All those attending the Colloquium are welcome to attend the dinner.

Outreach and widening participation

2012-01-24T06:34:00.000-08:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

Applications are now open for our annual Sutton Trust Summer School in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, which will take place on 13th-17th August. The Sutton Trust is an organisation which seeks to promote social mobility through education, and each year participants in our Summer School are given the opportunity to experience life as a Cambridge undergraduate: staying in a College, attending lectures and seminars, and receiving one-to-one or small group 'supervisions' on the languages, literatures, and history of medieval Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia. More information on how to apply is available via the University's webpages.

The Summer School is only a small part of the work we do to promote wider engagement with ASNC particularly, and medieval studies more generally. In recent months, for example, I have given various lectures in Cambridge to groups of pupils visiting from Langdon School, East Ham, and from Westminster Academy; I also headed to Dormers Wells High School, London, to give lectures on medieval Irish literature to students drawn from the Borough of Ealing's 'gifted and talented' programme; and last October, I gave a lecture on the historical Macbeth as part of the University of Cambridge's 'inspiring ideas' series. In all cases, I was overwhelmed by the natural enthusiasm shown by the students for medieval studies, despite the fact that most of them had not encountered medieval history or literature as part of their school curriculum.

Giving a lecture to secondary school pupils (and their teachers) on the real Macbeth

So, if you are a Year 12 pupil who is interested in the medieval world, and who attends a state school, please consider applying for a place on the Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC. Each year, these Summer Schools give students the confidence to apply for a place at Cambridge, or at other leading universities: it could be a life-changing experience for you too.

Cultures in Contact: Conference for Teachers interested in the Medieval World

2012-01-16T12:39:00.000-08:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

On Saturday 14th January, just before the return of our students and the beginning of the new term, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic welcomed sixty school teachers, from all over the country, for a one-day conference on the theme of 'Cultures in Contact'. The conference sought to present to teachers working in a variety of disciplines (History, English Literature, Classics and Religious Studies were all well-represented), and at a variety of schools, some of the cutting-edge research being undertaken in the Department, with the general aim of drawing attention to the richness and diversity of medieval studies (now often sadly neglected in the GCSE and A Level curricula). The conference - which was fully booked well in advance (and, indeed, was over-subscribed) - featured the following papers:

Dr Andrew Bell - 'Thinking about early medieval Europe'

Dr Richard Dance - 'Roots, blends and buttocks: finding the Vikings in the English language'

Professor Simon Keynes & Dr Rory Naismith - 'Money talks: wealth and power in Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia

Dr Paul Russell - 'Reading Ovid in medieval Wales'

Dr Elizabeth Boyle - 'From Shakespeare to Tennyson: Celtic influences in English literature'

The day concluded with a Q&A session, which covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from aspects of the University's admissions process to themes which had emerged from the papers earlier that day. Having received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the teachers who participated - and having been delighted at their enthusiasm for, and interest in, all things medieval - we certainly hope to repeat the event in future years.

The Department would like to say an enormous 'thank you' to Dr Denis Casey for co-ordinating the event so efficiently, and to our departmental secretary, Mrs Jayne Riley, for her invaluable support.

ASNC-related news stories

2011-12-14T04:38:00.000-08:00

The BBC news website today has a story about the Silverdale Viking Hoard. You can find a link to the story here. In the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole continues his 'History of Ireland in 100 objects' with a discussion of the eleventh-century Clonmacnoise Crozier.

Varia

2011-12-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

At the 2011 E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture on Thursday 1st December, we were delighted to launch our latest Quiggin Pamphlet, based on last year's lecture. Professor Liam Breatnach, of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, is the author of the most recent of our famous green pamphlets, entitled: The Early Irish Law Text Senchas Már and the Question of its Date, E.C. Quiggin Memorial Lectures 13 (Cambridge, 2011). The pamphlet is available to buy from the Department for the sum of £5, including postage. And while we're advertising our publications, might we remind you that our Chadwick Lectures and Hughes Lectures are also available for purchase.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle has been awarded a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship for 'Experienced Researchers in the Historical Humanities', in the Gerda Henkel Stiftung/M4HUMAN programme. Beginning in October 2012, Dr Boyle will spend time in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish at University College Cork, working on a book which is provisionally titled 'The End of the World? Apocalyptic Expectation in Eleventh-Century Ireland'.

And finally, we'd like to draw your attention to some interesting archaeological finds in Scotland, made by the Rhynie Environs Archaeological Project, which will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on our understanding of early medieval Pictish society.

Public lecture in ASNC

2011-11-29T09:03:00.000-08:00

The 2011 E.C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture will take place on Thursday 1st December, at 5pm, in room GR.06/07 of the English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

Prof. Odd Einar Haugen, of the University of Bergen, will speak on:

'So that the writing may be less and quicker, and the parchment last longer':

The Orthographic Reform of the Old Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise

An abstract is available here.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the social space of the English Faculty Building.

All welcome.

Insular Economics - Workshop Report

2011-10-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

The interdisciplinary Insular Economics workshop, run jointly by Andy Woods and Russell Ó Ríagáin (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research) and Denis Casey (Department of ASNC) was held in the McDonald Institute on Saturday 10^th of September.

The workshop was opened by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Reader in Celtic at ASNC, and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge) and there followed a series of papers that offered major challenges to current scholarly assumptions about economic activity in medieval Ireland and how it is studied. For example, volumes of coin use in medieval Dublin were shown to be considerably higher than one might have imagined, methods of defining economic hinterlands were challenged and texts such as Lebor na Cert (‘The Book of Rights’) were the subject of fresh scrutiny.

The workshop finished with an open discussion led by Dr James Barrett (Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute) in which a number of the points raised were further examined and the thorny question of synthesis in archaeological, historical and textual studies explored — to limited agreement! Nonetheless, it is hoped that many of the contributors will go on to publish their findings and contribute substantially to the study of the economy/economies and economics of medieval Ireland.

Festival of Ideas

2011-10-25T02:35:00.000-07:00

On Saturday 29th October, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will be holding a series of short public lectures on the theme of 'War and Peace in the Early Middle Ages' as part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas. Speakers will include Prof. Simon Keynes, on recent archaeological evidence for violence towards Vikings in Anglo-Saxon England, and Dr Judy Quinn on the valkyrie in Old Norse literature. This event is free, and open to all (suitable for ages 14+), but pre-booking is required. For details, see the Festival of Ideas website.

Viking-Age execution site in Dorset, picture from BBC News website

ASNC-related news stories

2011-10-19T01:14:00.000-07:00

Many of you will have seen the news about the Ardnamurchan Viking boat burial. On a somewhat related note, Fintan O'Toole continues his 'history of Ireland in 100 objects' in The Irish Times and enters the Viking Age. Previous articles by O'Toole in this series have covered the medieval Irish high crosses and an eighth-century crucifixion plaque. Rather belatedly, we also draw your attention to the news about the Oxford Viking massacre site, which was reported in the BBC a few months ago.

Converting the Isles

2011-10-07T06:35:00.000-07:00

Dr Roy Flechner writes:

On Friday and Saturday 23 - 24 September 2011, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (University of Cambridge) hosted a two-day interdisciplinary conference on conversion to Christianity in North West Europe. It featured papers by an international group of historians, archaeologists and philologists, who were given a unique forum in which to explore conversion comparatively by focusing on different parts of Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland in the early and central middle ages. The combination of places chosen for the discussion reflects our wish to establish a wide comparative framework, covering areas that are of significance to the study of conversion in both the pre-Viking and the Viking era. The talks were recorded and audio podcasts will be posted online soon.

high cross, Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo

(photo by Dr Elizabeth Boyle)

The format of the conference was unique in that speakers were asked to deliver talks in sessions with prescribed titles, for instance 'Perceptions of Pagan and Christian', 'Conversion Processes', or 'Ritual'. Each session comprised two speakers, who represented either distinct disciplines, or who work on different parts of the Insular world. The idea behind this format was to encourage dialogue across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, and by so doing to expand the academic discourse on conversion to Christianity and make it more inclusive. The success of the conference has made us confident that an even wider inclusive framework -- encompassing Western Europe as a whole -- is something to strive for. Sixty-three delegates registered for the conference, comprising an even mix of established academics and students. Attendence was not confined to Britain: delegates also arrived from Ireland, Germany and the United States. Since the conference's central objective was to foster a genuine constructive dialogue between academics who study conversion, much time was devoted to discussion after the talks, and the conference concluded with a very energetic round table discussion attended by approximately thirty people. Participants at the discussion were given a chance to develop topics that were raised by the speakers, and explore them in depth, but also informally. In addition, ideas for future collaboration between scholars were aired, and are now being pursued.

We are grateful to the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Conference Series Fund, the Newton Trust, and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, for their generous financial support that enabled this conference to proceed.

The Festschrift for Thomas Charles-Edwards was also launched as part of this event.

Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards

2011-10-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

Dr Fiona Edmonds writes:

On the evening of Friday 24th September, a reception was held on the ASNC terrace in conjunction with the highly successful Pagan and Christian conference. The reception provided an excellent opportunity to launch a new book: TOME: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards. A number of the contributors to the volume were present. Thomas Charles-Edwards, who had been speaking at the Pagan and Christian conference, was present at the reception. He had not been aware of the book launch, and it proved to be a pleasant surprise for him (we hope!).

A toast to Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards

The book was edited by two of Thomas’s former students, Paul Russell and Fiona Edmonds, both of the department of ASNC. Fiona and Paul gave speeches praising Thomas’s contribution as a teacher of undergraduate students, a supervisor of graduate students, and a leading member of the scholarly community. We also praised Thomas’s highly significant contribution to scholarship, which is demonstrated by the bibliography included in TOME. Paul took the opportunity to explain the book’s title, which has provoked considerable interest. The title has a double inspiration: not only is the latest of Thomas's big books always known in his family as 'the tome', but the so-called 'Pillar of Thomas' (Lower Court Farm, Margam, now in the Margam Stones Museum), which features on the book's cover (the image expertly drawn by Ben Russell) shows a carved cross with the word TO || ME with two letters either side of the shaft of the cross. TOME (a spelling for the Latin genitive singular Tomae) means 'of Thomas' and could scarcely be more appropriate as a title for this volume. But, of course, TOME could also be a dative singular, 'for Thomas', and that is indeed what this volume is with gratitude and affection.

The editors with Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards

The volume features essays that range across the medieval Celtic world, including medieval Wales, Ireland and Scotland. In the first part of the volume, they cover historical aspects (and, as is fitting, often reflect the honorand's interest in archaeology and epigraphy); in the second, they focus on medieval Irish and Welsh legal institutions and texts, which are used by some to inform new readings of literary texts. For more information, see the website of the publisher, Boydell and Brewer.

Obituaries for Mark Blackburn

2011-09-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

An obituary for Dr Mark Blackburn (1953-2011), prepared for the British Numismatic Journal, has been made available electronically in advance of its publication. It can be found here.

[Edit: 30/09/11] Another obituary for Mark appeared in the Guardian on 29th September (online edition; it appeared in the paper edition on Friday 30th September) and can be found here.

[Further edit: 30/09/11] Mark is also the lead obituary in today's Times (p. 64 of the paper edition; accessing the online edition of The Times requires a subscription).

[Further edit: 26/10/11] Mark's obituary appeared today in the Telegraph.

Memories of Old Awake

2011-09-27T01:36:00.000-07:00

As part of the 'Cambridge Ideas' series, learn more about Dr Emily Lethbridge's exploration of the landscapes of the Icelandic sagas ...

New book!

2011-09-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell, both of the Department of ASNC, have recently published a volume of essays on the life and scholarship of the Celtic scholar and colonial jurist, Whitley Stokes (1830-1909). The volume arises from the conference which took place in September 2009 to commemorate the centenary of Stokes' death.

The wide-ranging volume includes essays on Stokes' pivotal contribution to the popularisation of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám; Stokes' friendships with the Pre-Raphaelites; an account of his legal career in India; and an assessment, by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, of Stokes' place within the phenomenon she calls 'imperial medievalism', namely the conjunction between scholarly interest in the European Middle Ages and Britain's imperial presence in India.

Of particular interest to Celtic scholars is Pól Ó Dochartaigh's chapter on Stokes' relationship with Rudolf Thomas Siegfried; Paul Russell's chapter on Stokes' collaborations with Henry Bradshaw; Pádraic Moran's chapter on Stokes and the native Irish linguistic tradition; Thomas Charles-Edwards on Stokes and medieval Irish law; and Aderik Blom on Stokes' scholarship on Continental Celtic.

The volume is published by the leading Irish academic publisher, Four Courts Press.

Dr Mark Blackburn

2011-09-03T02:27:00.000-07:00

It is with deep sadness that we report the death of Dr Mark Blackburn LittD., Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum and Reader in Numismatics and Monetary History in the Department; he died at home on 1 September 2011.

Insular Economics: programme and abstracts

2011-08-25T03:44:00.001-07:00

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
10^th September 2011

The programme and abstracts for the workshop Insular Economics: Ireland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Century (10^th September, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge) are now available on the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic website: http://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/news/2011/07/25/651. This interdisciplinary workshop will feature new lines of enquiry into the economies and economics of eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland, being pursued by early-career researchers (PhD and Post-doctoral), from Cambridge, Belfast, Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool. Attendance is free and limited number of places are still available. Anyone interested in attending should contact the convenors, via the above link, before Friday 2^nd September.

Call for Papers: Power and the Sacred in the Medieval World

2011-08-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Call for Papers: Power and the Sacred in the Medieval World
(5th - 15th centuries), 26th November 2011, University of Leicester

This conference will explore the origins and development of the relationship between ‘power’ and ‘sacred’ in the Medieval World (5^th to 15^th centuries) addressing the possible transformations and transitions of these terms within a broad time frame, and how they were realized in people, places and objects, and in different faiths, for example Christianity, Judaism and Islam. ‘Outsider’ perceptions of the ways in which power and the sacred were constructed or reconstructed according to context are also significant: how and what were the interactions between sacred objects/people/places by peoples of different faiths? how would these have been perceived? how did movements such as the Crusades affect notions of sacred and power? how did gender affect interactions between sacred objects/people/power?

We would like to invite postgraduate students to contribute to this discussion at an interdisciplinary conference being held at the University of Leicester on 26 November, 2011. We are particularly keen to encourage debate between disciplines, and invite students of History, English, Archaeology, Theology and Art History, or any other aspect of medieval studies broadly construed, to attend and present a paper.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

· The roles of religious institutions in channelling power, both sacred and political: Did these roles change depending on place and alliances with political figures? Where did monasteries ‘fit’ as a religious institution and how did they channel power?

· Literary constructions of power and/or sacrality: How were these dynamisms recorded by whom, and why?

· Conflicts between different types of sacralities and/or power: Who were the main agents for these conflicts? How did particular agents affect the construction of sanctity and power?

· The role of saints in the Medieval World: how far did ‘national power’ align with ‘national’ saints or sacred objects? Are there noticeable transformations over time? How did these compare between regions (i.e. Britain and Francia/ Western Christendom and Islamic Near and Middle East), or in relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims?

· The perceptions of ‘peripheral’ people on power and/or sacred: how did the poor, the ‘lower classes’ and foreigners perceive interactions between ‘State and Church’?

The principal aim of this conference is to create a forum for debate by exposing researchers to developments in and around their fields, and by creating a space for new ideas between disciplines to emerge.

Please send 300-word abstracts for papers (20 minutes long) to Shazia Jagot at sj82@le.ac.uk by the 26August 2011. Proposals for Posters are also welcome.

Insular Economics: Ireland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

2011-07-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

Event Type: Early Career Workshop

Date: Saturday 10th September

Venue: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Address: Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3ER

This one-day workshop—hosted by the Department of ASNC and McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research—will be dedicated to exploring the economies and economics of Early Medieval Ireland and their wider Insular contexts. Papers by early career researchers from Britain and Ireland will explore topics such as numismatics, exchange networks, administrative documentary traditions, settlements, environmental impact and the application of theoretical economic models.

Attendance is free and places are limited. Please contact one of the coordinators (Denis Casey dc399@cam.ac.uk; Russell Ó Ríagáin rmo31@cam.ac.uk or Andy Woods arw66@cam.ac.uk) for more information.

Peter’s Pence and Beyond: Monetary Links between Anglo-Saxon England and Rome

2011-07-17T01:54:00.000-07:00

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

Despite being separated by a thousand miles of sea, land and mountain, Anglo-Saxon England enjoyed a close connection with Rome: seat of the papacy and a leading beacon of spiritual and cultural authority in early medieval Europe. This special relationship went back to the first mission of St Augustine to the English in 597, sent at the behest of Pope Gregory I (590–604), but persisted in the centuries that followed as English kings, clergy, pilgrims and traders made frequent trips to the eternal city. Many kinds of evidence survive to show how large Rome loomed in the minds of early medieval Englishmen and women. One particularly vivid source for both their piety and their economic interests comes in the form of money brought from England to Rome in the Anglo-Saxon period. Written records show that such gifts were taking place as early as the eighth century, though by the tenth century they had assumed the more or less regular form of Peter’s Pence: a penny donated by every Anglo-Saxon household to St Peter at Rome.

House of the Vestal Virgins in the Forum Romanum, where a hoard of over 800 English coins dating to the tenth century was found in 1883. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RomaCasaVestaliDaPalatinoOvest.JPG]

Dr Rory Naismith, a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, and Dr Francesca Tinti, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country and an honorary research associate of ASNaC, have recently been awarded a research grant by the British Academy to look afresh at the movement of money between England and Rome at this time. In the course of 2012, they will go on research visits to Rome to re-examine material in museums and archives. Finds of English coins have been numerous in Rome, among them such famous pieces as a unique gold coin in the name of Offa, king of the Mercians (757–96), made in imitation of an Islamic gold dinar (now in the British Museum). Also, there has been a glut of major hoards from the tenth century comprising about a thousand coins in total. Indeed, English coins constitute the bulk of all those found within Rome dating to between the late eighth and late tenth centuries. These have much to tell about England’s coinage at that time, and also about the nature of links between England and Rome: they say as much about economic activity as devotion, and should be seen as the residue of trade and exchange as well as pious donations. Dr Naismith and Dr Tinti’s research will shed new light on the significance of this material for bonds – cultural, religious and monetary – tying England to Rome at a formative stage.

Coins of Pope Hadrian I (772–95) and Wulfred, archbishop of Canterbury (805–32), the latter drawing inspiration from Hadrian’s earlier coinage. Both coins illustrated courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

A parallel strand of research will involve analysing the metallic content of a selection of silver coins from the Fitzwilliam Museum minted under the authority of the popes from the 770s to the 970s. These fall during the heyday of movement of English coins to Rome, and have never before been examined in this way. Determining the purity of these coins’ silver, and the quantity of other trace elements within them, might pave the way towards some understanding of where the popes looked for models and bullion in minting their coinage. This might in turn shed some light on the fate of English silver on arrival in Rome: was it melted down to provide local currency, or were other sources of silver drawn on? What was the final chapter of movements of English coin to Rome?

More congratulations!

2011-07-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

The awards and prizes are flooding in this month! Here are some more:

Dr Nick Zair, Research Fellow in Peterhouse and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge has been awarded the Johann-Kaspar Zeuss Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies of 2011. The title of his dissertation, which was completed in Oxford, is: ‘The reflexes of the proto-Indo-European laryngeals in Celtic’. The prize is awarded by the Societas Celtologica Europaea.

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Barraclough (ASNC) who has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Dr Barraclough will hold her fellowship in the Faculty of English, with an affiliation to The Queen’s College, and will be working on a research project mapping the literary landscape and conceptual geography of the medieval Norse world, with close readings of the sagas at the heart of the investigation. This literary analysis will be supported by an interdisciplinary methodology that explores the links between the sagas’ literary designs and the geographical conditions, historical reality, socio-political conditions and cultural memories underpinning Norse society.

Widening participation

2011-07-06T04:53:00.000-07:00

As part of the University of Cambridge's ongoing commitment to widening participation in higher education, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic runs a summer school in association with the Sutton Trust. In these 60-second videos, some of last year's participants talk about their experiences studying ASNC.

Congratulations!

2011-07-04T02:52:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to a number of ASNCs who have receieved various awards and prizes in recent weeks:

At the end of May, Dr Rory Naismith became the youngest recipient (at the age of 27) of the Blunt Prize, awarded by the British Numismatic Society, for his exceptional scholarship on Anglo-Saxon coinage.

The Scandinvian Studies Fund awarded the 2011 Wallenberg Prize to two students: Moa Höijer (ASNC & Hughes Hall) for her essay on 'Perceptions of an outcast: Loki's motivation in Lokasenna', and to George Walkden (Dept of Linguistics & Clare College) for his essay 'The correspondence problem in syntactic reconstructon'. The Wallenberg Prize is awarded for an essay on some subject connected with the language, history or civilization of one or more of the Scandinavian peoples

And last but not least, Dr Denis Casey has been awarded a Fellowship by the Society for Renaissance Studies, to work on Christopher Nugent's primer of the Irish language, created for Elizabeth I, within the contexts of second language teaching during the Renaissance and the Gaelic grammatical tradition. Dr Casey wrote about this primer for the Irish Examiner recently.

—•—• ••— •— —•—• •••• ("cuach")

2011-07-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

In Acallam na Senórach, the dialogue between St Patrick and Caílte (an aged survivor of Finn Mac Cumail’s war band) on the places and lore of Ireland, Finn enquired of his companions what music was best. Their answers conjured up a cacophony of the landscape: baying hounds, bellying stags, swords striking, ladies laughing, cuckoos calling.

Like Caílte’s reminisces, Pat Collins’s film Tim Robinson: Connemara, based on the work of the current Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies, was dominated by sound and music, as much by the physical landscapes and seascapes that have been the subject of Robinson’s work. The landscape filled the ears, while the camera panned slowly in soft focus over Robinson’s extraordinarily detailed maps of Connemara. Funneled wind howling through the bearnaí and mámanna faded into a soft breeze over bogs where the naosc binn ’s an crotach glórach could be heard, before morphing into the cry of a gull by the shoreline’s contours, only to be drowned in rhythms drummed against wave-lashed cliffs. Similarly, Susan Stenger’s soundtrack, inspired by Marconi’s wireless experiments in Connemara, strikingly encapsulated the natural themes, as the Irish word cuach (‘cuckoo’) was played in Morse Code while Robinson searched amid the denuded foliage of Derryclare wood for Cuach na Coille (‘The Cuckoo of the Wood’).

Tim Robinson: Connemara brilliantly brings to another medium the work of a latter day embodiment of both Caílte and Patrick, and is a film deserving of repeated viewing — and listening. Finn’s conclusion is admirably justified: the best music is ‘the music of what happens’.

Adventures in a graveyard, Part 2

2011-06-20T05:50:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

Following my adventure in search of the memorial cross erected at St Fintan's church, Sutton, Co. Dublin, to the Celtic scholar, Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), I decided to find the place where he is actually buried, in Paddington Old Cemetery, London. I was particularly interested to see whether his gravestone was similar in style, or whether it bore a similar inscription, to the cross at St Fintan's.

Stokes' memorial cross at St Fintan's, Sutton, Co. Dublin

Paddington Old Cemetery is located in the diverse district of Kilburn, north of Kensington (where Stokes lived after returning from India in 1882 until his death in 1909).

Paddington Old Cemetery, London

I found Stokes' grave in somewhat better condition than some of the others in its vicinity. The cross was indeed in the Celtic Revival style, although notably less ornate than the memorial cross at Sutton.

grave of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), Paddington Old Cemetery

The inscription was also quite different from that at St Fintan's. First, there was no indication of Stokes' profession or scholarly interests.Where the St Fintan's cross had described him as 'Jurist, Scholar and Philologist', his London gravestone gave only the spare details of his name and dates, reflecting perhaps the more private, family-oriented nature of the memorial, as opposed to the more public, or scholarly, nature of the Sutton cross. The quotation chosen for the inscription was also quite different in tone. Where the St Fintan's cross stated:

DIE WAHRHEIT RUHT IN GOTT

UNS BLEIBT DAS FORSCHEN

('Truth lies with God; for us remains Research')

the Paddington memorial gave a biblical quotation, from Philippians 4:8:

WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE TRUE. WHATSOEVER THINGS

ARE HONEST. WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE JUST.

WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE PURE. WHATSOEVER THINGS

ARE LOVELY. WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE OF GOOD

REPORT. IF THERE BE ANY VIRTUE, AND IF THERE BE

ANY PRAISE, THINK ON THESE THINGS.

Stokes grave inscription

The overall effect was simple, but quite moving, and in striking contrast to the form and content of the St Fintan's memorial. But having found Stokes' grave I decided that the next challenge would be to find his house. So I left Kilburn, and set off towards one of London's most affluent districts:

Grenville Place, Kensington

Perhaps rather fittingly, Stokes' home at 15 Grenville Place technically no longer exists, since 14 and 15 Grenville Place have been knocked together and turned into separate flats. However, the house still retains the impressive frontage, including the front door (no longer in use), which it would have had in Stokes' day.

15 Grenville Place, Kensington, formerly the home of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909)

In Stokes' time, as now, this was a prosperous part of London, and emphasises the wealth which Stokes accumulated during his time as a colonial jurist in British India, where he became President of the India Law Commission. A stark contrast indeed to the penniless young barrister who had to sell his furniture in order to buy his passage to India in 1862, and a reminder of the more problematic moral complexities of the life of Ireland's greatest Celtic scholar.

ASNC Open Day 2011

2011-06-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

The next ASNC Open Day will take place on 29th June. All those interested in applying to study ASNC - and their parents/guardians - are welcome, but booking is essential: further details and the booking form can be found on the ASNC website. Lecturers in ASNC will give brief introductory talks on aspects of the ASNC Tripos, and there will be a visit to the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, to see some Anglo-Saxon and Celtic manuscripts.

Dr Fiona Edmonds addresses a previous Open Day audience

ASNC in the media

2011-06-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, University Lecturer in Scandinavian History of the Medieval Period, was one of Melvyn Bragg's guests on In Our Time on Radio 4 yesterday. The episode discussed the Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066). You can listen to the programme (for the next few days only) via the BBC's iplayer.

Dr Emily Lethbridge, Honorary Research Associate in ASNC, who is currently travelling around Iceland, visiting the sites of Old Norse saga literature, was interviewed for Radio Cambridgeshire. Again, you can listen to the interview via the BBC's iplayer (starts at 16:40), and follow Emily's journey via her blog.

Ryan Giggs' super-injunction: the ASNC perspective

2011-05-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Prof. Simon Keynes, of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge, gives his historical perspective on the 'King Cnut of Football', Ryan Giggs, to the BBC. Read the story here.

Open Resources for Celtic

2011-05-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Jack Leigh writes:

Ever searched in vain for an online text or translation? Wanted to make a correction to something you did find? Only found out about online resources after you managed without them? Open Resources for Celtic Studies is the beginnings of a project to provide an easily-accessible repository of open [1] information of use to Celticists. At the moment it’s somewhat lacking but you can help change that! Please take a look and, if you like the idea, do something to help out.

Things you could do include:

Contribute some translation or bibliography (you need to revise those set texts anyway!)
Post an article you’ve written
Post links to existing online resources you know
Pick a character and write about them (texts they appear in, etc.)
Any other idea you think would be useful!

I was fortunate to recently meet Lucy Chambers and Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation (which has brought us cool projects like Open Shakespeare, Public Domain Works, and Open Bibliography) and we discussed some of the ways to take this idea forward, perhaps through integrating it with work done for Open Shakespeare, into a wider ‘Open Literature’.

Things I would currently like to see include: a comprehensive bibliography which links books and articles with their reviews, and allows users to add their own reviews; profiles of literary characters, texts they appear in and genealogical information; open transcriptions, critical editions and translations marked up using TEI XML. Anyone have grand ideas of their own? Please take a look and see what you can make of the resource.

[1] “A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” (See http://www.opendefinition.org/, particularly the ‘Open Knowledge Definition’ for further explanation)

Report of Chadwick Lecture

2011-05-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Dr Jonathan Jarrett, of the University of Oxford, has an interesting report on his blog of Prof. Wendy Davies's 2011 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, which she delivered in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic on 17th March.

Film Review: "Thor" - for Better or Norse?

2011-05-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Robin McConnell writes:

You will probably already be familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that is, the series of film adaptations of Marvel Comics superhero properties which began with 2008’s Iron Man and includes The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, the forthcoming Captain America: The First Avenger and the subject of this review, Thor; a series that will culminate in 2012’s The Avengers, featuring all four superheroes. Created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby in 1962, the Marvel Comics series Thor was always one of the more controversial comic books in the genre – just how tasteful was it to appropriate a bygone culture’s mythology and twist it to your own post-industrial, twentieth-century, Cold War-influenced, all-American ends? This is the question that Stan Lee did not ask himself when he decided to create the ultimate superhero: no more (near-)mortal beings with god-like powers, just an all-powerful god, pure and simple.

Consequently, Thor was always going to be the toughest Marvel Comics hero to translate to the big screen. The difficulty comes in trying to integrate a god into the technology-based, sci-fi world of Iron Man and the Hulk. So how do Marvel Studios get around this? Simple: Asgard becomes another dimension where science and magic are “one and the same” (to quote the script), with a portal gate at the end of the Rainbow Bridge that allows its inhabitants – styled ‘Asgardians’ in the film, not ‘Æsir’ – to travel to Earth. The gods are super-powered, yes, but the trick is to recast them as superhuman aliens, not as deities. For example, Thor has no discernable powers of his own except being extra-buff (much to the delight of female members of the audience) – his powers such as they are come from his hammer, Mjolnir (sic.). This isn’t true of all the Asgardians, most of whom are given their own personal skill, but for the most part they are nearly-plausible ‘scientific’ versions of the Norse gods rather than traditional comic book superheroes with impossible magic powers. Then there are the Frost Giants, who break this portrayal by being huge and able to freeze anything, as well as having monstrous guard dogs the size of Godzilla. Oh, well, we can’t have everything.

Marvel Comics' Thor (image from http://marvel.wikia.com/Thor_Odinson_%28Earth-1610%29)

So, to the story. Is it good? Well, it’s not bad. The premise is that Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is heir to the throne of Asgard, and extremely arrogant and irresponsible to boot. When he disobeys his father Odin’s (Anthony Hopkins) orders and attacks the Frost Giants, almost causing a full-scale war between them and Asgard, he is banished to Earth, where he is to be powerless until he can prove his worth. On Earth, he meets astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) who helps him survive in an unfamiliar world where he is not only unimportant, but also wanted by secret government agency SHIELD who have taken possession of Mjolnir, which was sent down to Earth separately from Thor. From there it’s a traditional journey of romance and redemption with all the action you’d expect from a summer blockbuster. The twist is the choice of Kenneth Branagh as director. Best known for his work adapting Shakespearian plays to the screen, his influence is most felt in the first portion of the film set in Asgard where the plot machinations are almost lifted wholesale from the Bard: the triangular relationship between Odin and his sons Thor and Loki reflects King Lear, Hamlet and Othello in its depiction of a jealous manipulator (Loki) exploiting the strained relationship between favourite-son (Thor) and father (Odin) for self-gain. This forms the dramatic core of the plot and is probably the most satisfying section of the film, reaching its climax with a spectacular assault by Thor, Loki, Sif and The Warriors Three (Asgardians invented for the comic) on Jotunheim, home of the Frost Giants. Once Thor is on Earth, it transforms into a fish-out-of-water comedy which is genuinely very good. This reflects arguably the film’s greatest strength: the realisation that all the Shakespearian drama in the world won’t engage the audience fully unless the inherent silliness of the scenario is acknowledged and embraced, but without sinking to Batman & Robin levels of self-parodic farce.

Branagh’s influence can also be seen in the casting. Australian actor Chris Hemsworth is excellent as the titular meat-headed lug with a big heart, showing a surprising gift for self-deprecating comedy in the earthbound sequences. Natalie Portman isn’t bad as the love interest, but her character is a classic Hollywood ‘glamorous female scientist’ cliché. She is upstaged by comedy sidekick Kat Dennings, who to be honest seems a much more appealing romantic interest than Portman: witty, smart, pretty… of all the (surprisingly numerous for a blockbuster) female characters in the film she comes off best. But I guess we can’t blame Thor for picking Natalie Portman – heck, she’s richer and has an Oscar. Tom Hiddleston gives the stand-out performance as Loki, one of recent cinema’s most complicated and sympathetic villains. An old theatre pal of Branagh, it’s clear that the director has a liking for Hiddleston, since Loki gets not only a lot of screen-time but also the best dramatic material with which to work. Anthony Hopkins gives a great turn as Odin, toning down his recent penchant for scenery-chewing in favour of a performance with gravitas instead of gravy. And what spectacular scenery it is. Asgard is simply one of the best alien worlds – sorry, dimensions – designed in recent cinema. My only gripe is that it’s too clean. Where are the cleaners? Where are the repair men? The place feels hardly lived in, which is a shame given it’s meant to be thousands of years old. This and the iffy green-screen work in Jotunheim spoil the illusion of Thor being more than a movie – a significant flaw since Branagh is clearly aiming for an epic drama with the scale and weight of Richard Donner’s Superman, the standard against which most comic book movies are measured, and still one of the best.

Where Thor really falls down is in its last half an hour. After what feels like lots of really good set-up for Thor learning his ways and thwarting Loki’s promised-to-be-evil plans, the audience is treated to a quick montage of Thor being nice to people, a half-hearted fight with a giant robot (The Destroyer, again a new creation for the comics) and a showdown with Loki that has a nice pay-off but reveals the villain’s Grand Plan and motivations to be… crap. To avoid spoilers I won’t say what it is, but honestly, what a letdown.

For the first time in a long while (painful memories of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End coming to mind) I’m going to recommend that Thor needed to be longer and more complex. Thor’s emotional progressive from arrogant idiot to sensitive hero should be gradual and profound, but it’s over remarkably quickly. Similarly, the romance between Jane Foster and Thor is under-developed. Although I personally found the story’s suggestion that two people (or a god and a person) can be strongly physically attracted to each other without all the emotional baggage of ‘it’s what’s inside that counts’ quite refreshing, the climactic devotion they express to each other is unconvincing. As such, Thor ultimately feels superfluous and lightweight despite its promising start. An entertaining night out at the cinema? Yes. An immediate entry into a viewer’s ‘favourite films’ list, that will last in the memory? No.

Now for the big question: is Thor a respectful appropriation of Norse mythology, or an unholy bastardisation of everything that is precious about pre-Christian Scandinavian religious culture? Before answering, I must admit that I know next to nothing about Norse mythology. I read the Edda once three years ago and haven’t looked back. So, in my less-than-expert opinion, I have to say that Thor is a respectful appropriation of Norse mythology. The advantage the filmmakers had was the ability to sift through fifty years of comic books as well as genuine Norse tradition (what has survived of it, anyway) from one thousand years ago and pick and choose the best stuff. Read the comics and the first thing you’ll notice is the daft costumes and the Shakespearian-like dialogue (“because it sounded archaic”, explained Stan Lee). Then you’ll notice the really sci-fi elements, with spaceships, green aliens and X-Men all co-existing alongside our favourite Asgardians. Then you’ll notice that, like most Marvel Comics, the stories are actually terrible. The film spares us these cheesy ingredients, instead giving us a more accessible and slightly less ridiculous version of the comics, while remaining true to the characterisations of the gods from Norse tradition. There are a fair few changes: Sif is now a dark-haired warrior-type; Thor is blond, not red-haired; Loki isn’t mischievous so much as evil; Odin is now Loki’s father; new Asgardians are created while characters from the original tradition aren’t featured... I’m sure there are many more, but I can’t be bothered to list them. But if you can accept the alt-reality sci-fi premise of Asgard being just another dimension home to a civilisation light-years ahead of our own, you shouldn’t have a problem with these changes. Yes, I agree that it’s a shame to transform Norse mythology into a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi epic with Shakespearian aspirations instead of actually film the damned original stories, but that’s comic books for you. And the key thing to remember is that Thor is an adaptation of those comic books. I can only be thankful that the film isn’t as bad as its source material.

Adventures in a graveyard

2011-05-13T17:29:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

In 2009, Dr Paul Russell and I held a conference in Cambridge to commemorate the centenary of the death of Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), colonial jurist and Celtic scholar. A volume arising from that conference is soon to be published by Four Courts Press, but my interest in Stokes has continued to grow, and last week it led me to a graveyard in Co. Dublin in search of a putative memorial cross which was apparently erected for Stokes shortly after his death.

Stokes, who was born in Dublin, left Ireland in 1852, at the age of twenty-two, when he went to study law in London. Although he returned to Ireland for brief visits, he never again lived there, instead travelling to India in 1862, where he spent twenty years in Calcutta and Simla, codifying Anglo-Indian law, eventually becoming President of the India Law Commission. He returned to London in 1882, and spent the rest of his life there. He was a founding fellow of the British Academy. Stokes published prolifically on medieval Celtic languages and literatures, and it remains the case that many medieval Irish texts are only available in print in Stokes's editions and translations. Stokes died in 1909, and was buried in London.

However, according to the genealogical website of a Stokes family in Australia, a memorial cross had allegedly been erected at a "St Finian's" church on the Howth peninsula, in Co. Dublin. In following up this lead, I faced two problems: first, that this cross is not referred to anywhere in the scholarly literature (e.g. in the entries on Stokes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, or the Dictionary of Irish Biography), and so I had no more specific information to go on than one brief remark on a single website; and second, that there is no "St Finian's" church on the Howth peninsula.

It seemed most likely to me that "St Finian's" was a misreading of St Fintan's, a church located in Sutton, close to Howth, and which dates back to the early medieval period (fitting for a scholar such as Stokes, with his interest in the culture of early medieval Ireland). So, on a drizzly, overcast Thursday, I took the DART from central Dublin to Sutton, and wandered through the graveyard in search of a cross which I wasn't sure even existed.

Remains of the early medieval church of St Fintan's, Sutton, Co. Dublin

After some time, I came across a memorial cross for Stokes's brother, Sir William Stokes, a noted surgeon who died in South Africa:

Memorial for Sir William Stokes (1839-1900), with the graves of his wife and daughter

Realising that I must be on the right track, I looked at an elaborate cross nearby, in the Celtic Revival style, and located just behind that of William Stokes. Sure enough, it was the memorial cross erected for Whitley Stokes:

Memorial cross for Whitley Stokes (1830-1909)

Memorial cross for Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), St Fintan's, Sutton

In addition to the ornate decoration on the cross itself, there is an inscription on its base, which reads:

IN MEMORY OF WHITLEY STOKES

SOMETIME LEGAL MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF INDIA

JURIST, SCHOLAR AND PHILOLOGIST

FOREIGN ASSOCIATE OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE

BORN 28 FEBRUARY 1830, DIED 13 APRIL 1909

BURIED IN LONDON

DIE WAHRHEIT RUHT IN GOTT

UNS BLEIBT DAS FORSCHEN

The German quotation, from Johann von Müller, at the end of the inscription (which translates as 'Truth lies with God; for us remains Research'), is particularly fitting since Stokes himself quoted it in the seminal 'Miscellanea Celtica' study, in which Stokes published the work of his late friend, Rudolf Thomas Siegfried (1830-63), a talented philologist who had died prematurely.

Base of Stokes' memorial cross, St Fintan's, Sutton

However, this was not my only discovery that day, and when I went over to examine the remains of the medieval church of St Fintan's I was surprised to find, only a few metres from the church, the grave of Whitley Stokes's sister, Margaret M'Nair Stokes (1832-1900), who was a respected art historian in her own right. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Margaret Stokes was considered to be the leading authority on medieval Irish art and architecture.

Grave of Margaret M'Nair Stokes (1832-1900), art historian

And so, in an elevated position overlooking Dublin Bay, the greatest philologist Ireland has ever produced, and the most significant Celtic scholar of the nineteenth century, has a fitting memorial, close to that of his surgeon brother, and the grave of his art historian sister, testimony to the wide-ranging talents and enduring legacy of one of Ireland's most prominent academic families.

Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture

2011-05-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

On Monday 9th May, Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards, Jesus Professor of Celtic, University of Oxford, will deliver the 2011 Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture on:

'St Patrick and the Landscape of Early Christian Ireland'

Lives of St Patrick, from the late-seventh century onwards, are rich in information about the political and ecclesiastical landscape—about small kingdoms and large, about ‘seats of kingship’ and local churches. Occasionally they touch upon the major places of pre-Christian Ireland as these were understood in the Christian period. The latter are ubiquitous in early Irish narrative literature and then in the Dindshenchas ‘place-history’ of Middle Irish. The lecture will discuss the relationship between Patrick’s places and those believed to be the central places of pre-Patrician Ireland.

This lecture will take place at 5.45pm in the Pavilion Room, Hughes Hall, Cambridge. All welcome.

Authorities and Adaptations

2011-05-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

On Friday 15th and Saturday 16th April, thirty scholars working on various aspects of medieval Irish history and literature gathered in Cambridge for an advanced research workshop on the theme of 'Authorities and Adaptations: the Reworking and Transmission of Sources in Irish Textual Culture, c. 1000 - c. 1200'. The reshaping of earlier source material to accommodate contemporary concerns is a significant phenomenon in medieval literary culture, and particularly so in Ireland. The process of recycling and reworking textual materials has often been commented on by scholars of medieval Irish, but had never been systematically interrogated. Over the course of the two days of the workshop, Celticists from Britain, Ireland, Germany and the United States, addressed the question of how sources were reshaped and adapted in eleventh- and twelfth-century Ireland. By studying how older authorities were used in medieval Ireland, the participants sought to further our understanding of how medieval Irish intellectuals and authors understood their own history and literary inheritance.

The papers presented at the workshop encompassed texts in both Latin and Old/Middle Irish, and ranged across many genres, from law to history-writing, from narrative prose to doctrinal poetry, and from biblical exegesis to grammatical tracts. A number of papers also focused on how earlier texts, including legal texts, grammars and poetry, accreted layers of learned commentary, which shaped the way those texts were read and understood by later audiences. As all of the papers demonstrated, the reworking of earlier source material was not merely a deferential act of preservation: rather, authors engaged actively with their sources, reshaping them to meet contemporary concerns, and using authorities to lend weight to words that would resonate with new, and changing, audiences.

The workshop was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the H. M. Chadwick Fund, and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. The programme of papers was as follows:

Papers I – III
Session chair: Dr Pádraic Moran (NUI Galway)
I. Prof. Patrick O'Neill (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): 'Old wine in new bottles: the reprise of early Irish Psalter exegesis in the eleventh and twelfth centuries'
II. Dr Deborah Hayden (Hughes Hall, Cambridge): 'Metrical mnemonics and anatomical accents in Auraicept na nÉces'
III. Dr Paul Russell (University of Cambridge): 'Adaption, re-working and transmission in the commentaries to Amrae Coluimb Chille'

Papers IV - VI
Session chair: Dr Paul Russell (University of Cambridge)
IV. Dr Elizabeth Boyle (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge): 'Invisible authority: Echtgus Úa Cúanáin’s use of Paschasius Radbertus in his poetic treatise on the Eucharist'
V. Dr Brent Miles (University College Cork): 'The Hiberno-Latin background to the Sermo ad reges and an Irish tradition of advice to kings'
VI. Dr Caoimhín Breatnach (University College Dublin): 'Irish and Latin abridged versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus'

Papers VII-VIII
Session chair: Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (St John’s College, Cambridge)
VII. Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards (Jesus College, Oxford): 'The manuscript transmission of Bretha Comaithchesa'
VIII. Prof. Máire Herbert (University College Cork): 'Some thoughts on history and history-writing in the post-Viking era'

Papers IX-XI
Session chair: Dr Ralph O’Connor (University of Aberdeen)
IX. Prof. Ruairí Ó hUiginn (NUI Maynooth): 'Recycling a cycle: some late "Ulster" tales'
X. Dr Hugh Fogarty (University College Cork): 'Aided Guill 7 Gairb and the "inward look" in late Middle Irish prose saga'
XI. Dr Geraldine Parsons (University of Glasgow): 'Revisiting Almu in Middle Irish texts'

Papers XII – XIII
Session chair: Dr Mark Williams (Peterhouse, Cambridge)
XII. Prof. Michael Clarke (NUI Galway): 'Catheads and Trojans: reworking of Sex Aetates Mundi material in later medieval narratives'
XIII. Prof. Dr Erich Poppe (Philipps-Universität Marburg): 'On some sources of "On the beginning of Christ’s teaching" in the Leabhar Breac'

Paper XIV-XV
Session chair: Dr Elizabeth Boyle (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge)
XIV. Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (St John’s College, Cambridge): 'Authorial attribution in twelfth-century Ireland: new wine in old skins'
XV. Dr Kevin Murray (University College Cork): 'The reworking of Old Irish texts in the Middle Irish period: contexts and motivations'

ASNC on TV

2011-04-18T03:14:00.000-07:00

The ASNC department's Dr Paul Russell featured in the BBC's recent 'History of Celtic Britain' documentary. It can be viewed via the BBC iplayer facility here. (Unfortunately this may not be viewable in all countries).

Seachtain na Gaeilge report

2011-04-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson writes:

The two-week celebration of Seachtain na Gaeilge in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic opened on 9 March with a lecture by Dr. Tim Robinson, Parnell Fellow at Magdelene College for 2011, author of several books and creator of beautifully detailed maps on Aran, Connemara and the Burren. Robinson spoke on the ‘Geophanic Language of Ireland’ and led a discussion on the value of place and Irish placenames—a topic touched upon in his Parnell Lecture and developed further in this open discussion. Faculty, students and guests from various disciplines had an opportunity to examine Robinson’s detailed maps, which were passed around the large round table during the discussion. Robinson noted the importance of the lore of prominent places (dindshenchas) in medieval Irish texts; he also recounted stories about sacred places which he collected from local inhabitants while walking in remote landscapes in search of holy wells, prehistoric forts and other antiquities. The long-term consequences of the loss of place and the effects of rapid change in Ireland were also considered.

Among Tim Robinson’s many publications are Connemara: Listening to the Wind; Connemara: the Last Pool of Darkness; and Stones of Aran: Part I: Pilgrimage. He is also the subject of the recent film Tim Robinson: Connemara, directed by Pat Collins.

On 17th March the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, and St John’s College, offered faculty, students of palaeography and visitors from various disciplines an opportunity to see the ‘Southampton Psalter’, an Irish psalm-book of ninth or tenth century date and one of the finest treasures of the Old Library of St. John’s College (more details on the Southampton Psalter can be found here).

Examining a map from Cox's Hibernia Anglicana (1679) (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)

Dr. Denis Casey, Honorary Research Associate in medieval Irish history, guided participants through the history of the manuscript and spoke on the significance of the interlinear Irish and Latin glosses in this predominantly Latin manuscript. Dr. Casey offered insights into the bilingual culture in which the Psalter was produced and drew attention to some particularly interesting Irish glosses, including the scribe’s passing comment in his own native language: ‘it is Beltaine (Mayday) today, a Wednesday.’ Those who were present at the viewing had the pleasure of closely examining the decorated initials, interlace work and three striking illuminated images (of David and Goliath, David fighting the lion and the Crucifixion) in the intimate setting of the Old Library. The Special Collections librarian, Kathryn McKee, graciously welcomed the group and prepared a display of other texts of Irish interest from the library’s collection of rare books. These included sketchbooks of travels in Ireland by the antiquary and astronomer, John Lee (1783-1866), a graduate of St. John’s College; a life of St. Patrick by Richard Stanyhurst (published 1587); a map of Ireland from Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (published in 1679), and a natural history of Ireland from 1729.

Examining the Southhampton Psalter (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)

Visiting the Old Library at St John's (photograph by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge)

Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas - Colloquium Report

2011-04-06T00:37:00.000-07:00

The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas held its Annual Colloquium in the Faculty of English on Saturday 19 March 2011, organised by Deborah Hayden with the help of several members of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. The day began with the Leslie Seiffert Lecture, given this year by Professor Emeritus Richard Hudson of UCL, who discussed ‘Why History Matters: From Babylon to Sweet, Tesnière, Chomsky and the National Curriculum’. This was followed by a variety of stimulating papers on topics ranging across the historical study of Chinese, Dutch and Italian. In the afternoon members were treated to a series of Celtic-themed talks, including a discussion of the study of Gaulish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and two papers on medieval and early modern Irish respectively by ASNaC members Paul Russell and Denis Casey. The event ended with an engaging contribution from Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade concerning her recent book on the life and work of the eighteenth-century English grammarian Robert Lowth.

John Walmsley (Bielefeld) and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Leiden/Cambridge)

Graham Pointon, Georgia Henley (ASNaC) and Louis Kelly (Cambridge)

Seachtain na Gaeilge, so far ...

2011-03-11T09:13:00.000-08:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

The famous Irish poet Antaine Ó Raiftearaí may have complained that he was ag seinm cheoil do phócaí falamh (‘playing music for empty pockets’) but anyone who attended last night’s Irish poetry and music event at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic will have come away feeling much fuller than that blind poet’s pockets ever did.

As part of the ongoing Seachtain na Gaeilge, Tim Robinson (Parnell Fellow at Magdalene) held an informal discussion of the value of Irish placenames (Wednesday 9th March), before last night’s wonderful recital by the students of the Department’s modern Irish language classes, which ranged from Katie McIvor’s enchanting solo harp performance of The Waves of Gola to a rousing ensemble chorus of the old Jacobite song Óró sé do bheatha abhaile (‘You are welcome home’). The beautifully enunciated poetry performances were similarly varied, as the words of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Pádraig Pearse and Seán Ó Ríordáin (among others) and the landscape of Connemara (through a special visual presentation), were all vividly brought to life.

Katie McIvor plays The Waves of Gola

The performers are all students of modern Irish in Cambridge (while also studying and working in a variety of departments throughout the university) and hail from a variety of countries, including Holland, Australia, USA and Finland. Their high standard of Irish is a credit to their teacher in the Department of ASNC, namely Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson.

Ensemble performance of Irish songs

In the first performed poem, Ceist na Teangan (‘The Language Issue’), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill wrote that she placed her hopes in the little Moses basket of the Irish language, in the anticipation that it might one day land in the lap of a Pharaoh’s daughter. It appears to be in good hands so far.

Students of Modern Irish in the University of Cambridge (in front of portraits of some of our illustrious Elrington & Bosworth Professors of Anglo-Saxon)

ASNC Hosts Viking Society Student Conference

2011-03-07T04:50:00.000-08:00

Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe reports:

The Viking Society for Northern Research was founded in 1892 and is now a professional organisation for scholars and researchers in the fields of Viking Age Scandinavia and Old Norse literature. In addition to offering public lectures and publishing a scholarly journal and monographs, the Viking Society organises a conference every spring with a student audience in mind.

This year, ASNC was the host department, and on 12 February Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and Dr Judy Quinn held the conference on the theme of 'The Material Past: Understanding the Old Norse World'. The speakers were all top-level researcher in fields such as archaeology, history of religion, and Viking Studies, and they were asked to discuss an Old Norse text of their choosing in the light of their non-literary research. An overflow crowd of undergraduate and graduate students from across the UK and from as far afield as Norway filled Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, and all agreed that it was a marvellous opportunity to learn about interdisciplinary approaches to Viking and Old Norse Studies and to ask questions of the experts.

Stefan Brink of the University of Aberdeen began by investigating whether we could rely on the sagas' information about slaves and slavery, and Christina Lee of the University of Nottingham followed by asking whether sagas tell us anything useful about the status of the physically different. Adolf Friðriksson of the Institute of Archaeology of Iceland continued the theme of bodies by discussing death and burial in sagas and archaeology. After lunch, the topic turned from bodies to objects. John Hines of the University of Cardiff discussed poems and sagas that mention houses and artefacts decorated with mythological scenes, and Judith Jesch of the University of Nottingham showed how the references to Viking weapons in skaldic verse corresponded closely to actual weapons that have been found. Lesley Abrams of Oxford University concluded the talks with a survey of runic inscriptions on stone in Britain and Ireland that might provide evidence of the religious beliefs of the Scandinavian settlers in those places. In a final discussion, the speakers asked each other questions about their presentations, and the audience was fascinated to see the experts debate the topics among themselves in a very lively fashion.

To find out what else the Viking Society offers, check out its website.

Seachtain na Gaeilge in Cambridge

2011-03-03T06:55:00.000-08:00

Seachtain na Gaeilge, 2011
5 - 17 MARCH

As part of the celebration of 'Seachtain na Gaeilge', a two-week festival which promotes Irish language and culture in Ireland and abroad, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will host the following events in the English Faculty Building, Sidgwick Site, 9 West Road.

9 MARCH (Wednesday), 5pm, English Faculty Board Room

Dr. Tim Robinson, Parnell Fellow
The 'Geophanic' Language of Ireland: A Discussion on the Value of Irish Placenames

Tim Robinson, author of several books on the landscape of Connemara and the Aran Islands and creator of beautifully detailed maps, will consider the importance of place in Ireland and the consequences of the loss of place in the modern world. All are invited to come and examine Dr. Robinson's maps of Connemara and participate in an informal discussion on the value of place--a topic thoughtfully probed by Robinson in his
recent Parnell lecture.

10 MARCH (Thursday), 5pm, ASNC Common Room

Dánta agus Ceol/ Poems and Music
Irish Film: 'KINGS'

A group of students from Modern Irish language courses will read selected Irish poems, perform traditional music and present a photographic travel account of the Irish landscape.

Student performances will be followed by a showing of 'KINGS', an Irish language film (with subtitles) and winner of five Irish Academy Awards. The film explores the lives of six men who left their homes in Connemara in 1977 with hopes of a better life in England.

Colm Meaney in Kings (image from Alt Film Guide www.altfg.com)

17 MARCH: H. M. Chadwick Lecture, 5pm (G-R 06/ 07)

Professor Wendy Davies (University College London) will present the annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture: Water mills and cattle standards: probing the economic comparison between Ireland and Spain in the early middle ages

Irish Manuscripts:
The Chadwick lecture will be preceded by a viewing of medieval Irish manuscripts at St. John's College. Places for the viewing are limited; to book please contact Denis Casey (dc399@cam.ac.uk).

These events will be followed by refreshments. All are welcome to attend.

Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas - Programme

2011-03-02T02:59:00.000-08:00

The Annual Colloquium of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas will take place in the Faculty of English on 19 March 2011. Registration is £30 (full) or £15 (student/unwaged); forms can be found here. The programme is as follows:

Henry Sweet Society

for the History of Linguistic Ideas

Annual Colloquium

Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Saturday 19 March 2011

PROGRAMME

9.00: Registration and Coffee

Faculty of English Foyer

9.50: Opening remarks: Andrew Linn (University of Sheffield)

Faculty of English Room GR06/07

10.00: Leslie Seiffert Memorial Lecture: Professor Emeritus Richard Hudson (UCL)

‘Why History Matters: From Babylon to Sweet, Tesnière, Chomsky and the National Curriculum’

11.00–11.30: Coffee and refreshments

Faculty of English Foyer

11.30–13.00: Session I

Faculty of English Room GR06/07

Chair: Nicola McLelland (University of Nottingham)

11.30–12.00: Hung-yi Chien (National Taiwan Normal University)
The Jesuit grammatology of Chinese from Ricci to Prémare

12.00–12.30: Camiel Hamans (European Parliament, Brussels)

The Reception of TGG in the

Netherlands

in the sixties of the 20^th century

12.30–13.00: Helena Sanson (University of Cambridge)

Women’s language in the ‘Questione della Lingua’ debates of post-unification

Italy

*******

13.00–14.00: Lunch

Faculty of English Foyer

14.00–14.30: Annual General Meeting of the Henry Sweet Society

*******

14.30–15.30: Session II

Faculty of English Room GR06/07

Chair: Deborah Hayden (University of Cambridge)

14.30–15.00: Toon Van Hal (Research Foundation, Flanders)
From Alauda to Zythus: Collecting and discussing Old-Gaulish words in Early Modern Europe

15.00–15.30: Paul Russell (University of Cambridge)

Irish f-, Latin u-, and the Greek digamma: Medieval Irish perceptions of sound laws, sound change, and linguistic borrowing

15.30–16.00: Coffee and refreshments

Faculty of English Foyer

16.00–17.00: Session III

Faculty of English Room GR06/07

Chair: Paul Russell (University of Cambridge)

16.00–16.30: Denis Casey (University of Cambridge)

Teaching Irish to the English Queen

16.30–17.00: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (University of Leiden/University of Cambridge)

The Bishop’s grammar: Revising Robert Lowth’s status as a prescriptivist

17.00: Closing remarks

‘A Land without Shortcuts’ — 2011 Parnell Lecture in Irish Studies

2011-03-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

‘What makes a place out of a locality?’ was one of the many thought-provoking questions posed by Dr Tim Robinson, 2010–11 Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies, in his masterful 2011 Parnell Lecture, delivered at Magdalene College, Cambridge, yesterday.

Charles Stewart Parnell (image from www.nndb.com)

Named for Charles Stewart Parnell, the ‘Great Adulterer’ and Magdalene College dropout still beloved of the Irish people, the Parnell Fellowship and Annual Lecture have provided forums for some of the most talented minds in Irish studies. This year the polymath Tim Robinson — author, mathematician, geologist, poet and cartographer (among other things) — skillfully expounded upon potential threats to the landscapes and seascapes of the Aran islands, Burren and Connemara; places on which he has become the greatest commentator and authority since J. M. Synge. His discussion of present day (and potential) adverse human impact upon these areas, both upon the physical environment and our perceptions of place, was set within an impressively large timeline stretching over geological and environmental eons. Questions from the audience, however, indicated that not everyone was in complete agreement with his assessment of modern human impact vis-à-vis that of previous generations and indeed natural forces of much longer duration. I came away feeling that while Robinson has not squared this circle, his answer to the above question, ‘it is the attention which we bring it’, is deserving of deeper reflection somewhere in the ‘long dark night of the intellect’ upon which he has previously written.

The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past

2011-02-26T23:57:00.000-08:00

Dr David Woodman and Dr Martin Brett are hosting a two-day conference on 29th - 30th March on 'The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past' at Robinson College, Cambridge, in association with the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, and the British Academy. Registration is £20, and details on how to register can be found here. The programme is:

Tuesday 29th March
10.15 – Registration and Coffee
11.00 – Welcome

Session I: The Anglo-Saxon Saints
Chair: Prof. N. Brooks
11.10: Dr R.C. Love: ‘Folcard of Saint-Bertin and the Anglo-Saxon Saints at Thorney’
11.50: Prof. R. Bartlett: ‘The Viking Hiatus in the Cult of Saints as seen in the Twelfth Century’

12.45 – Lunch in Robinson College

Session II: Anglo-Saxon England in the Narrative of Britain
Chair: Dr M. Brett
14.00: Dr J. Barrow: ‘Danish Ferocity and Abandoned Monasteries: the Twelfth-century View’
14.40: Prof. D.W. Rollason: ‘Symeon of Durham’s Historia de regibus as a Product of Twelfth-century Historical Workshops’
15.20: Dr H. Doherty: ‘The Twelfth-Century Laymen and the English Past’

16.00 – Tea and Coffee

16.30: Prof. J. Gillingham, ‘Some Late Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past’
17.10: Prof. R.M. Thomson: ‘William of Malmesbury's Unknown anti-Norman Diatribe’

End: 17.50

Wednesday 30th March

Session III: Anglo-Saxon Law and Charter
Chair: Prof. S. Keynes
09.30: Prof. N. Vincent: ‘The Use and Abuse of the Anglo-Saxon Past: The Royal Charter Evidence’
10.10: Dr S. Baxter - title to be confirmed

10.50 - Tea and Coffee

11.30: Prof. N. Brooks: ‘Was there a “Textus Cantuariensis” and what did it contain?’
12.10: Prof. B. O’Brien: ‘Anglo-Saxon Law-Makers and their Laws in the Twelfth Century’

12.45 – Lunch in Robinson College

Session IV: Scribes, Artists and the French Vernacular
Chair: Prof. M. Lapidge
14.00: Dr J. Crick, ‘Norman Imitation of Pre-Conquest English Script: Possibilities and Limitations’
14.40: Prof C. Karkov: ‘The Scribe Looks Back: Anglo-Saxon England and the Eadwine Psalter’

15.20 - Tea and Coffee

15.50: Dr T. Webber: ‘Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Office Readings in Post-Conquest England’
16.30: Dr J.E. Weiss: ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Anglo-Normans: “History” in Anglo-Norman Romance’

End 17.10

Another ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship!

2011-02-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Dr Deborah Hayden, who has just been elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford, beginning in October 2011, to work on the medieval Irish poetico-grammatical treatise Auraicept na nÉces.

Deborah outlines her proposed research project here:

I will spend the next three years working on a manuscript study of the Irish treatise on linguistic and poetic theory entitled Auraicept na nÉces, ‘The Scholars’ Primer’, which has long been recognised as a valuable source for the study of literary and intellectual life in medieval Ireland. The Auraicept consists of a concise core of text, possibly datable to as early as the eighth century, to which a copious amount of commentary was subsequently added; the abundance of this commentary testifies to the considerable popularity of the work amongst medieval Irish scholars over an extended period. The Auraicept represents one of the earliest sustained attempts in Western grammatical tradition to contrast a classical language with a vernacular one, as it weaves native terminology, ideas and allusions into a structural framework heavily influenced by classical doctrine on grammar and rhetoric. The work’s commentators drew upon a range of different sources, revealing not only what they perceived to be of importance in the study of their language, but also how they articulated the relationships between linguistic theory, rhetorical practice and literary authority. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the Auraicept’s seminal role in Latin and vernacular learning in medieval Ireland, its contribution to our understanding of medieval literary genre, and the light it sheds on Ireland’s engagements with continental Europe in the medieval period. However, several manuscript copies of the treatise have still not been comprehensively examined, and it is the aim of my project to fulfil the need for an in-depth and up-to-date study of the Auraicept’s manuscript transmission, including further research into the nature and sources of its accreted scholia.

Parker Library blog and CCASNC

2011-02-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

Two notices which may be of interest:

First, the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, now has a blog, which you can find here.

Second, the 2011 Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, which is organised by postgraduate students in the Department of ASNC, will be held on 26th February. This year's theme is 'Colliding Worlds', and the Colloquium will feature two keynote lectures: Prof Malcolm Godden, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, who will be speaking on 'Old English Orosius and its sources' and Dr. Paul Russell, Reader in Celtic, University of Cambridge, who will be speaking on 'Revisiting the "Welsh Dictator" of the Old English Orosius'. The full programme, along with details of how to register, can be found here.

CFP: Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas

2011-01-29T05:35:00.000-08:00

This is a final reminder that the deadline for the submission of paper proposals for the Spring Meeting of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas is 31st January. The meeting takes place on 19th March. Further information can be found here.

Chadwick Memorial Lecture 2011

2011-01-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

The next public lecture in ASNC will be the 2011 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, on Thursday 17th March, at 5pm, in room GR.06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

Professor Wendy Davies (University College London) will speak on: 'Water mills and cattle standards: probing the economic comparison between Ireland and Spain in the early middle ages'.

Hector Munro Chadwick (1870-1947) was second Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge (1912-41). Through the immense range of his scholarly publications, and through the vigorous enthusiasm which he brought to all aspects of Anglo-Saxon studies -- philological and literary, historical and archaeological -- he helped to define the field and give it the interdisciplinary orientation which characterises it still. The Department of ASNC, which owes its existence and its own interdisciplinary outlook to H.M. Chadwick, has wished to commemorate his enduring contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies by establishing an annual series of lectures in his name.

The H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, established in 1990, is delivered by a scholar who is invited to Cambridge for the occasion, on a subjected calculated to be of interest to the whole Department.

Everyone welcome.

ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship

2011-01-14T05:38:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Levi Roach, a PhD student in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, and a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, who has just been elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, beginning in October 2011. Levi proposes to work on the following project for duration of his Fellowship:

Over the next three years I will embark on an exciting new research project, provisionally entitled ‘Apocalypse and Atonement around the Year 1000: Æthelred “the Unready”’ and Otto III in Comparison’. My intention is to investigate how discourses of penance and apocalypticism influenced kingship and politics at court in England and Germany in the 990s and early 1000s. Specifically, the study will focus on how the rulers of these two kingdoms, Æthelred II (better known to posterity as ‘the Unready’) and Otto III reacted to contemporary apocalyptic and eschatological fears. It has long been noted that a degree of millennial anxiety is visible in this period, and it has likewise long been appreciated that discourses of penance and repentance played an important role at Æthelred’s and Otto’s courts. My intention, however, is to look at the intersection between these two, which has yet to receive detailed commentary. The aim will be to investigate both how fears of the Last Judgement may have helped fuel concerns about penance and atonement, and how on the other hand such apocalyptic anxieties themselves may have been in part a product of contemporary concerns about sin and repentance. It is my contention that these concerns about apocalypse and atonement came together in a unique fashion in the 990s, in part—though certainly not only—in response to the approaching millennium. It is, therefore, no accident that both Æthelred and Otto are known to have performed penance, and equally no accident that in both cases this seems to have taken place in the later 990s.[1]

[1] That Otto III performed penance is well established and S. Hamilton, ‘Otto III’s Penance: a Case Study of Unity and Diversity in the Eleventh-Century Church’, Studies in Church History 32 (1996), 83–94, surveys the evidence admirably. The evidence for Æthelred’s penance is more circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless. It has yet to receive detailed treatment in print, but will be discussed at length in two forthcoming studies: C. Cubitt, ‘The Politics of Remorse: Penance and Royal Piety in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, Historical Research (forthcoming); and L. Roach, ‘Public Rites and Public Wrongs: Ritual Aspects of Diplomas in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, Early Medieval Europe 19 (forthcoming 2011). I am grateful to Dr. Cubitt for making her paper available to me in advance of publication. For the time being, see also her insightful remarks in ‘Ælfric’s Lay Patrons’, in A companion to Ælfric, ed. M. Swan and H. Magennis (Leiden, 2009), pp. 165–92, at 171–5.

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

2011-01-11T06:11:00.000-08:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

In 2011 the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will once again be running a Summer School in association with the Sutton Trust. This year the Summer School will take place from 22nd - 26th August. More details can be found via the University's Summer School pages, and in the film below, which features participants from last year's Summer School in ASNC:

Medieval Furness: Texts and Contexts

2010-12-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

Dr Fiona Edmonds writes:

I am writing to tell you about the AHRC-funded project ‘Hagiography at the Frontiers: Jocelin of Furness and Insular Politics’ and the associated conference ‘Medieval Furness: Texts and Contexts’, which will take place on 8^th July, 2011. I am the Co-investigator on the project; the other participants are Dr Clare Downham, University of Liverpool (Principal Investigator) and Dr Ingrid Sperber (Research Associate). The project will run for two years, from July 2010 until July 2012.

The aims of the project are threefold: to bring forth editions and translations of two texts (Jocelin’s Lives of Patrick and Helena); to conduct research into the cultural context in which Jocelin was working; and to further knowledge of Jocelin’s work amongst the general public, particularly in Cumbria and North Lancashire. The writings of Jocelin of Furness have not attracted a great deal of scholarship, although there has been a resurgence of interest in his work recently, as witnessed by Dr Helen Birkett’s book The Saints’ Lives of Jocelin of Furness (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010). The study of Jocelin’s work has been made more difficult by the absence of satisfactory published editions of certain texts, notably the Life of St Patrick. Jocelin’s writings are, however, of great interest to scholars of twelfth-century Britain and

Ireland

Furness Abbey (image from Wikimedia commons)

One of the most interesting features of Jocelin’s work is his interest in the Celtic world: Jocelin not only wrote a Life of Patrick, but also a Life of Kentigern (a North British saint and the patron of Glasgow) and a Life of St Helena, whose Brittonic origins were stressed by Jocelin. Jocelin also composed a Life of St Waltheof (d. 1159), who was abbot of Melrose in the Scottish Borders, a leading monastic reformer in northern England and a stepson of the Scottish king David I. It is interesting to ponder the extent to which the location of Furness Abbey (pictured) facilitated Jocelin’s connections with, and interest in, the Celtic world. The Furness peninsula lay at the outer edge of the Anglo-Norman realm and Furness fell under Scottish rule for a time. The inhabitants of Furness were culturally and linguistically diverse and the location of the peninsula – protruding into the Irish Sea – facilitated contact with Ireland and the Isle of Man. My role in the project is to investigate the cultural and linguistic history of medieval Furness and to study Furness’s network of daughter houses, many of which were located in Ireland and Man.

The project’s main themes will be explored in our day conference ‘Medieval Furness: Texts and Contexts’. The conference will take place at the Abbey House hotel, Barrow-in-Furness; the programme is copied below. The conference is supported by the University of Liverpool and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge. Please contact Dr Fiona Edmonds to obtain further information and a booking form.

Programme:

9.00 Registration

9.30 Opening remarks: Keith Stringer (Lancaster University)

9.45 Janet Burton (University of Wales, Trinity Saint David)

Furness, Savigny and the Cistercian World

10.15 Hugh Doherty (University of Oxford)

The twelfth-century benefactors and enemies of Furness Abbey

10.45 Tea/Coffee

11.15 John Reuben Davies (University of Glasgow)

The Life of St Waldef, abbot of Melrose

11.45 Marie-Therese Flanagan (Queen’s University, Belfast)

The Life of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland

12.15 Seán Duffy (Trinity College Dublin)

Ulster, Dublin and the Irish Sea Region in the age of Jocelin

12.45 Lunch

2.00 Helen Birkett (Edinburgh University)

Jocelin and the literary legacy of Furness Abbey

2. 30 Jason Wood (Heritage Consultancy Services)

Furness Abbey: art, literature and tourism

3.00 Closing Remarks: Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford)

3.30 Visit to Furness Abbey

6pm Conference dinner

Dr Mark Blackburn on Radio 4 tomorrow

2010-12-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

On Tuesday 6th December, Dr Mark Blackburn, keeper of coins and medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum and reader in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, was interviewed for Radio 4's programme iPM. His discussion on coins, medals and how they reveal our history can be heard tomorrow (Saturday 11th December) at 5.30pm, and will be available on the BBC's iplayer facility thereafter.

Digital Resource for Palaeography

2010-12-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Affiliated Lecturer in ASNC, Dr Peter Stokes, who teaches Palaeography in the department, and who has just been awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council for a project to develop a 'Digital Resource for Palaeography', based at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at King's College London. The details of the project can be found here.

CFP: Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas

2010-12-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

The next Spring Meeting of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas will be held on Saturday 19 March 2011 at the University of Cambridge. The Leslie Seiffert Lecture will be delivered by Professor Emeritus Richard Hudson of University College London.

Papers are invited on any topic within the History of Linguistics, and will typically be of 20 minutes’ duration with 10 minutes for discussion. All proposals, including title and abstract (maximum 250 words) should be sent either electronically or by post to the address below by 31 January 2011. Notification of acceptance of proposals will be made by 18 February 2011.

Booking forms will be available on the Henry Sweet Society website (http://www.henrysweet.org) from early January, and must be returned by

9 March 2011.

For abstract submissions and further information please contact:

Dr Deborah Hayden

Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic,

University of Cambridge

9 West Road,

Cambridge CB3 9DP, UK

dah58@cam.ac.uk

The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas was founded in February 1984. Its aims are to promote and encourage the study of the history of all branches of linguistic thought, theoretical and applied, and including non-European traditions. Its fields of interest include the history both of the major subject areas of linguistics and also of more specialised topics, such as writing systems, literacy, rhetoric, and the application of linguistic ideas within professional and technical fields. It also publishes the biannual journal, Language and History.

2010 Quiggin Memorial Lecture

2010-12-02T03:05:00.000-08:00

This is a reminder that the 2010 E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture will take place today at 5pm in Room GR.06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

Prof Liam Breatnach, School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, will speak on: 'The early Irish law text senchas már and the question of its date'.

All welcome.

Author, authority and books in Benevento

2010-11-23T03:59:00.000-08:00

Dr Rosalind Love writes:

Ten days ago I stepped off the crazy whirl of Cambridge term-time to attend the 6^th Congress of the International Medieval Latin Committee, at Naples and Benevento (10-13 November). After inaugural speeches at the University of Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples, two coach-loads of medieval latinists embarked for Benevento, causing total gridlock, a cacophony of car-horns and colourful Neapolitan execration. At the rather quieter city of Benevento we witnessed a remarkable event: the coming-home of the first item to be repatriated under the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act 2009. In 1943 the Allies bombarded Benevento, flattening most of it, including the Cathedral and the Metropolitan Chapter Library. The manuscripts were taken to safety in a hand-cart, but in the confusion one went missing and ended up for sale in Naples, where it was bought in 1944 by an English officer, Captain Ash. The book, a 12^th-century illuminated missal in characteristic Beneventan script, and was bought at auction in 1947 for the then British Museum and catalogued as MS Egerton 3511. Later, although Benevento had proved its original ownership, requests for the missal’s return foundered on legislation preventing the British Library from ‘alienating’ any of its holdings, and even when the Spoliation Advisory Panel, set up to examine the loss of artefacts during the Nazi era, judged in 2005 that the book should go back to Benevento on loan, the BL’s rules about the safe-keeping of its manuscripts prevented it. A British journalist, Martin Bailey (of The Art Newspaper), and then more recently a lawyer, Jeremy Scott, took up the case, which was ultimately swung by the 2009 Act. Jeremy Scott finally handed the missal (which had travelled inside a box inside officially-sealed wrappings inside a padlocked case – after all that, thankfully a satisfyingly fat codex!) over to Monsignor Andrea Mugione, the Archbishop of Benevento (in the picture below, with Dr Mario Iadanza, Director of the Office of Culture in the Archdiocese), in the presence of us medieval latinists, the great and good of Benevento, and a hoard of paparazzi. It was rather a moving moment, not least because the handing-back took place within minutes of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

After that excitement, it was down to business for the 200 of us attending the Congress, whose theme was ‘Auctor et auctoritas’. I was there to represent a research project with which I’ve been involved since 2007, ‘Boethius in Early Medieval Europe. Commentary on The Consolation of Philosophy from the 9th to the 11th centuries’, funded for five years by the Leverhulme Trust and headed by Professor Malcolm Godden, of the University of Oxford, with Dr Rohini Jayatilaka as full-time researcher (see the project website). Written in about 525 as the exiled Boethius awaited execution, the Consolation is a remarkable work which is thought to have been ‘rediscovered’ in the late 8th century by Alcuin, and then steadily gained in popularity, prompting translations into Old English and Old High German, for example. Lady Philosophy’s effort to console her ‘pupil’ meant confronting BIG questions of universal interest: why evil people often seem to prosper, why bad things happen to good people, what true happiness is, how humans can have free will under the gaze of an omniscient God with a divine plan.

'Philosophia', in the tenth-century Canterbury

copy of the Consolation in Trinity College, Cambridge

Our project focuses on the nearly 80 manuscripts of the text surviving from the period up to ca. 1100. Almost all of them preserve annotation, sometimes very dense, reflecting medieval readers’ responses to every aspect of Boethius’s text, from his neo-platonic philosophy, his stories from Rome’s history and Classical mythology, to his quotations from Greek literature. The project aims to transcribe all of the annotation; these glosses have been studied before, but it always seemed an impossible task to assemble them all, for a complete overview of such a key text’s reception. The digital era, and a lot of hard work by my Oxford colleagues, has made it feasible, so we’re close to having all the material in hand – nearly 3000 pages of it – and are starting to edit for publication, of both the full corpus of Latin and Old English glossing and also a select version (based on one heavily-glossed copy from early 11th-century Abingdon, now in Cambridge, UL, Kk.3.21) with a translation into modern English, for a more general audience. The select edition will represent the ‘consumption’ of the Consolation in England around the year 1000, when interest in it peaked.

What I tried to show at Naples is that questions of both author and authority seem irrelevant in the case of glosses. The densest annotation suggests a steady accumulation of ideas across several periods and places, which often end up being presented all together, in many-layered glosses that read like a seminar: ‘some say it means this, other that or another thing; philosophers claim such and such, but that’s wrong because….’Another speaker in my session, Mariken Teeuwen, who led a project based at the Huygens Institute (in the Hague) on the glossing to another highly influential text, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, made very much the same point, that glosses show scholarly authority constantly being tested and questioned. She noted that similar conclusions emerge from the recent online project on the St Gall Priscian put together by someone very familiar to ASNC, namely Pádraic Moran, now based in Galway. Glosses take us right to the heart of the way knowledge circulated and scholarly debate was conducted in the Middle Ages: will they be analysing our marginal jottings in 3010?

Public lecture in ASNC

2010-11-18T02:36:00.000-08:00

On Thursday 2nd December, at 5pm, Professor Liam Breatnach, of the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Ireland, will deliver the 2010 E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture, in room GR.06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

The title of his lecture will be: 'The early Irish law text Senchas Már and the question of its date'.

Edmund Crosby Quiggin (1875-1920) was the first teacher of Celtic in the University of Cambridge. His extraordinarily comprehensive vision of Celtic studies offered an integrated approach to the subject; his combination of philological, literary and historical approaches paralleled those which his older contemporary, H.M. Chadwick, had already demonstrated in his studies of Anglo-Saxon England and which the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic continues to seek to emulate.

The E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lecture, established in 1993, is delivered by a scholar who is invited to Cambridge for the occasion, on aspects of philology and the textual culture of the Celtic and Germanic languages and literatures taught in the Department.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Everyone welcome.

ASNC on Radio 4

2010-11-10T04:49:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow morning (Thursday 11th November) at 9am, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, lecturer in Scandinavian History in ASNC, will be one of the guests on Melvyn Bragg's Radio 4 programme 'In Our Time', where the topic of discussion will be the 'Volga Vikings'.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Volga Vikings.

Between the 8th and the 10th centuries AD, fierce Scandinavian warriors raided and then settled large swathes of Europe, particularly Britain, Ireland and parts of northern France. These were the Vikings, and their story is well known today. Far fewer people realise that groups of Norsemen also travelled east.
These Volga Vikings, also known as the Rus, crossed the Baltic into present-day Russia and the Ukraine and founded settlements there. They traded commodities including furs and slaves for Islamic silver, and penetrated so far east as to reach Baghdad. Their activities were documented by Arab scholars: one, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, recorded that the Volga Vikings he met were perfect physical specimens but also "the filthiest of God's creatures". Through trade and culture they brought West and East into regular contact; their story sheds light on both Scandinavian and early Islamic history.

With:

James Montgomery
Professor of Classical Arabic at the University of Cambridge

Neil Price
Professor of Archaeology at the University of St Andrews

Elizabeth Rowe
Lecturer in Scandinavian History of the Viking Age at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Snorri is my homeboy

2010-11-09T02:54:00.000-08:00

As Christmas fast approaches, what could be a better present for a loved one than a 'Snorri is my homeboy' t-shirt? Or a 'What would Byrhtnoth do?' mug? The ASNC Society, run by undergraduates in the ASNC Department, have some fantastic merchandise, from umbrellas to aprons; ideal for the medievalist in your life.

The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage

2010-10-29T04:23:00.000-07:00

We would like to alert you to the adventure-cum-academic-project which is about to be undertaken by one of our Research Fellows, Dr Emily Lethbridge. Her blog can be found at http://sagasteads.blogspot.com/, but we also include an outline of her project below.

Dr Emily Lethbridge writes:

I complete my term as a post-doctoral Research Fellow (in medieval Icelandic literature) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in December 2010 and I am planning an ambitious and exciting project for 2011. I intend to move to Iceland in January 2011 in order to embark upon a year-long '21st-century pilgrimage to the saga-steads of Iceland'. I will drive from the UK to Denmark, where I will catch a ferry from Hirtshals over to the Faroe Islands, and then on to Iceland, weather at sea permitting. Once in Iceland, over the course of the year, I will travel around and across the country reading each one of the 13th-century Íslendingasögur (the Icelandic family sagas) in the physical landscapes in which they and their 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-century action are set. I will live for the most part out of my Land Rover ambulance and will move from farm to farm on the basis of introductions I already have and growing awareness and interest in the project. I want to talk to people I meet about their personal interests in, and responses to, the sagas and I hope to persuade people to tell oral versions of sagas they know, or episodes from sagas that are local to their part of the country.

* * *

In addition, I will draw on published 19th-century travel accounts by figures such as William Morris, W. G. Collingwood, and Sabine Baring-Gould, comparing what they found on visiting the saga-sites with what is to be found now. As I travel, I will write up my experiences and the end-product will be a book that will be published by a mainstream commercial publisher, and will be of interest not only to those who are already knowledgeable about Iceland and familiar with the sagas, but the wider British reading public. In essence, the book will be about Iceland and its unique landscape, the sagas against and within that landscape, the Icelandic people and their relationship with the landscape and the sagas, and continuity and change in Iceland from medieval to present times. The book will be illustrated with my photographs.

* * *

The financial collapse in 2008 and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 flung Iceland onto the global stage--albeit under a cloud, literally and metaphorically. British perceptions of Iceland are (often negatively) based on the after-effects of these events--i.e. the lock-down of international air travel--and on images of a bleak and inhospitable landscape used as the backdrop to 4-by-4 car adverts. I want to redress this situation by communicating to the British public how much more there is to Iceland. Most of what is written about Iceland for general consumption is based on the superficial experiences of commercial writers who have little or no previous knowledge of the country, its history and culture, and most importantly, the Icelandic language. I speak Icelandic fluently, however, and I know rural parts of the country well (and how Icelandic rural life works) as a result of working on a dairy farm in the north of the country.

* * *

Beyond the book, additional project outputs will be high-profile media coverage (national newspapers, magazines, radio), and I will also keep a blog in which I will report on my progress. By these means, I hope to communicate something of the remarkable character of Iceland--founded on informed knowledge and experiences--to the wider, non-academic public in the UK.

Festival of Ideas - Saturday 23rd October

2010-10-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

Tomorrow the ASNC Department will be holding an 'Anglo-Saxon Treasure' afternoon, as part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas. From 1.30pm until 5pm, the Department will open its doors (on the 2nd floor of the English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge) for an afternoon of fun, ideas and activities. Young children will be able to colour in 'Anglo-Saxon brooches', and make rune-sticks, and for the grown-ups there will be a talk from Prof. Simon Keynes on the Staffordshire Hoard, Dr Richard Dance will be performing excerpts from the Battle of Maldon in Old English, and Dr Rory Naismith will be speaking about Anglo-Saxon coins. Dr Debby Banham will also be on hand to help visitors concoct some Anglo-Saxon herbal remedies. We look forward to seeing you there.

Prof. Simon Keynes will be giving his expert assessment of the Staffordshire Hoard (pictured)

Life after ASNC

2010-10-18T01:33:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

The Sunday Times magazine carried an interesting interview with ASNC alumnus Dr Tom Shakespeare (Pembroke, 1984), and his daughter. Tom is an ASNC legend, on account of his being the first editor of Gesta Asnacorum, the scurrilous publication of the ASNC undergraduates, but he is best known to the wider world as a sociologist, author and campaigner for disability rights, and he currently works for the World Health Organisation. The link to the article is here, but unfortunately it requires a subscription to the Times website to see it. For those of you who can't see it, here's a link to what a few other ASNCs have got up to since they graduated, and here's a link to news about our alumni events (with Tom Shakespeare on the left in the photo from the 1980s alumni reunion). On 25th September, we were delighted to welcome many of our alumni back to the Department for a drinks reception with live music; our next alumni event will be on 24th September 2011, so if you are an alumnus or alumna of the ASNC Department, please do put that date in your diary. We are always delighted to hear about what our alumni are doing, so do contact the Department if you have any news for us.

Dates for your diary

2010-10-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

The new academic year began on Tuesday 5th October, and we were delighted to welcome many new faces (as well as many familar ones) to ASNC, including twenty-five new first year undergraduates, a dozen new M.Phil. students, four new doctoral students, and our new lecturer in Modern Irish, Dr Margo Griffin-Wilson, an expert on the poetry of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, who has previously taught Irish at Harvard University and the University of Utrecht.

In the year ahead there will be, as usual, a number of major public lectures in ASNC. Details will follow in due course, but the dates to remember are:

2nd December, the 2010 Quiggin Lecture, to be delivered by Prof. Liam Breatnach, School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
17th March, the 2011 Chadwick Lecture, to be delivered by Prof. Wendy Davies, University College London
9th May, the 2011 Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Prof. Thomas Charles-Edwards, Jesus College, Oxford

We look forward to seeing many of you there.

Icelandic at Cambridge

2010-10-01T04:08:00.000-07:00

Vicky Cribb writes:

There is more to Iceland than banking crises and volcanic eruptions, as you will discover if you come along to the Modern Icelandic language classes offered by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, with generous support from the Icelandic government. The classes, which are free of charge, are open to all members of the University and cater for beginners and intermediate students (depending on demand). They are not assessed but are taught on an informal basis, combining grammar instruction with practice in speaking, listening and reading.

There will be introductory sessions for both levels on Friday 15th October: beginners at 3 pm in Rm G-R04, intermediate at 5 pm in Rm S-R25 of the English Faculty. All members of the University are welcome.

For more information about the classes and learning resources, including links to online courses and Icelandic media sites, as well as opportunities for further study, see the Modern Icelandic webpages.

Instructor: Ragnheiður Guðmundsdóttir (rg432@cam.ac.uk). Until 15th October, please address any queries about the course to Vicky Cribb: vac32@cam.ac.uk.

Michaelmas Term Timetable:

Beginners: Michaelmas Term 2010, classes start 15th October and end 3rd December: 1 x 50 min/week, 3 pm, Friday, Rm G-R04, English Faculty.

Intermediate: Michaelmas Term 2010, classes start 15th October and end 3rd December 2010: 1 x 50 min/week, 5 pm, Friday, Rm S-R25, English Faculty.

Modern Irish Classes 2010-11

2010-09-29T04:38:00.000-07:00

Dr Deborah Hayden writes:

Thanks to the continued generosity of the Irish government, the Department of ASNaC will again offer Modern Irish language classes this academic year at beginners, intermediate and advanced levels. The course is free to all members of the University of Cambridge; individuals who are not affiliated to the University but are interested in attending are also welcome and are encouraged to contact the Head of Department, Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (mnm21@cam.ac.uk).

The Modern Irish Resources page on the ASNaC website has also been updated, and now includes many useful links to online dictionaries, broadcast media sites, Irish language immersion programmes and academic organisations.

All language classes for Michaelmas Term 2010 will take place in the English Faculty on the Sidgwick Site at the following times:

Beginners: Tuesdays at 5 p.m. and Thursdays at 3 p.m.

Intermediate: Mondays at 4 p.m. and Thursdays at 5 p.m.

Advanced: Wednesdays at 3 p.m. and one other hour TBA

In addition, there will be an Introductory Meeting for all interested students on 6 October at 1 p.m. in the ASNaC Common Room, English Faculty, Sidgwick Site.

If you have further questions about the classes, please feel free to contact the instructor, Dr Margaret Griffin-Wilson (mg597@cam.ac.uk).

We hope to see many of you there!

Modern Glosses

2010-09-22T03:14:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

In recent years the internet has become an indispensable tool for medieval scholars, with websites such as the Early Irish Glossaries Database, Parker Library on the Web and the Celtic Digital Initiative providing access to texts and images to users around the world. Websites, like any other medium, have both their advantages and limitations but an interesting, most likely unplanned, though certainly useful side effect has been produced by archive.org. That website, as its URL suggests, is a vast archive of useful material not always readily available in every library. The beauty of this service is that some of the actual digitized volumes themselves were formerly owned by well-known scholars and their annotations offer interesting insights into the texts and their interpretations of the texts, just like any medieval gloss or commentary.

To take an interesting example, consider the case of the Ancient Laws of Ireland series. That six-volume edition and translation of the corpus of medieval Irish law was based on the earlier work of the mid-nineteenth-century scholars Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, but not completed until 1901. It was widely castigated for errors in transcription and translation (not necessarily the fault of O’Curry and O’Donovan); to prove the point, Eóin Mac Néill, the great Scholar-Revolutionary, published a translation of two of its texts in 1923, shortly after emerging from jail and taking up the post of Minister for Education in the new Irish Free State, during the civil war. A later scholar and former Free State ambassador to Weimar Germany, D. A. Binchy (who incidentally left fascinating pen-portraits of Hitler, von Bruning and others in the pages of Studies), spent much of his career editing and translating various legal texts and finally produced a six-volume diplomatic transcript of the known legal manuscripts: Corpus Iuris Hibernici (1978). Nonetheless, many of the texts have neither been reedited nor retranslated since the publication of the Ancient Laws series. Luckily, at least some volumes from Binchy’s library found its way into the collection of Stephen B. Roman, who subsequently bequeathed them to J. M. Kelly Library, St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Among these are at least three volumes of Binchy’s annotated copies of the Ancient Laws, which are now available on archive.org. Anyone who has dealt with the complexities of (and frustrations attendant upon) working with medieval Irish legal texts will appreciate the help of one of the most notable scholars of medieval Ireland. Here are the links to volume 1, volume 3 and volume 4.

Investigating Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches

2010-09-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe, Lecturer in Scandinavian History in ASNC, writes about her current research on Ragnar Loðbrók:

One of my current research projects has to do with a legendary Viking named Ragnar Loðbrók. His nickname means ‘Shaggy Breeches’, and my husband likes to refer to him as ‘Ragnar Shaggy-Pants’. According to Ragnar’s saga (here illustrated by Niels Skovgaard), Ragnar got his nickname from the time that he killed a serpent, protected from the monster’s venom by a suit of fur clothing dipped in tar. As you might expect, by killing the serpent he won the hand of the lovely Thora. The story of Ragnar was very popular in Iceland in the Middle Ages, and Ragnar was believed to have been a real person, and even the ancestor of certain Icelanders. My project is to survey these references to Ragnar and to investigate what he meant to different authors. So far it appears that Ragnar was quite a malleable character. He could be the ancestor of the royal houses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, or he could be the representative of the evils of the pagan age, before Christianity came to Scandinavia. The author of Njal’s Saga uses Ragnar to establish that some Icelanders come from a noble background, in contrast to the author of Egil’s Saga, which uses Ragnar to symbolize the old order in Norway, which the new order of Iceland sets itself up against. Significantly, there is no text in Old Norse that lists all the descendants that have been attributed to Ragnar, or that showed Ragnarr as the father of Icelandic settlers and of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish kings. Evidently the ease with which his legend could be adapted led to such a proliferation of material that later Icelanders were unwilling to deal with it all – but I am.

(The caption of the illustration says ‘Thora sees Ragnar, and he sees her.’)

The influence of Old Norse on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

2010-09-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

Dr Richard Dance writes about his current research project, an etymological survey of words derived from Old Norse in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

The language of the Scandinavians who settled in Viking Age England had a profound influence on the history of English, including its vocabulary. A number of important, everyday Modern English words have been traced back to Old Norse (e.g. die, egg, ill, law, leg, low, seem, sky, take, window, not to mention the pronouns they, their and them), and there are hundreds of other likely instances in texts written during the Old and Middle English periods. The sociolinguistic context of the contact between speakers of Old English and Old Norse in the Viking Age, and the mechanisms by which material was transferred from one language to the other, have been the subject of important research in the last several decades (see notably M. Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout, 2002)). But there is still much work to do in order to understand the loaned vocabulary itself, particularly the Scandinavian influence on the lexicon of the great medieval English literary monuments composed in the North or North Midlands. My current research project explores one important work, the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

A view of 'Lud's Church', Staffordshire (possible inspiration for the 'Green Chapel'

in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Photo: Dr Richard Dance

Despite its celebrity as one of the pinnacles of Middle English literary achievement, and, what is more, though its vocabulary has frequently been held up as one of the most striking known instances of Scandinavian influence, there has been no complete etymological survey of Norse loans in Sir Gawain. This is perhaps because the identification of a list of these words is a task accompanied by so much uncertainty: the number of lexical items in the text whose development could be attributed to Norse input is very large, but (once we get beyond the obvious candidates) there is surprisingly little consensus about which exactly to include. At a minimum there are just over a hundred different words in Sir Gawain demonstrably derivable from Norse on the basis of comparative formal criteria (these include phonological ‘tests’ like the presence of a distinctively ON /sk/ in words like skete ‘quickly’, to be derived from ON skjótt rather than OE scēot- with its initial palatal, cp. MnE shoot). At the other extreme, taking into account the etymological labels and other remarks of the historical dictionaries, the glossaries (and notes) of the standard editions and assorted other studies, I have so far collected more than 450 total instances for which some influence from Norse has been suggested, including many for which the evidence is much shakier (amongst the more interesting and tentative are words like fysken ‘scamper’, gryndel ‘fierce’, runisch ‘rough, violent’). The disparity between these two extremes is nicely indicative of the difficulties that beset the etymological identification of Norse loans in general, and which result from two basic deficiencies in the pool of evidence: on the one hand the sheer formal similarity of Old English and Old Norse, which has self-evident consequences not only for the relatively easy transfer of material between the two, but for our capacity to identify it after the fact; and on the other the patchiness of the record of both languages in the periods before and during which contact took place. The first step in the investigation of these words cannot therefore be a simple matter of compiling a list of ‘bona fide loans’; but the grounds upon which Scandinavian influence has been identified need careful scrutiny and considered presentation before any further analysis can be undertaken. Taking Sir Gawain as my sample, my project therefore aims to discover not only what can be achieved by a thoroughgoing collection of all the many and various suggestions for Norse input in scholarly publications, it also sets out to be a reassessment of the methodological underpinnings of a subject central to English lexical history, whose principles have seldom been set out or discussed since the magisterial work of Erik Björkman (Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English (Halle, 1900–1902)).

I have been working on this material intermittently for a number of years, and my approach to the etymological arguments has evolved as I have collected more and more suggested loans. Over the next few months I intend to prepare the main elements of my research for publication. This task has been greatly facilitated by the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), whose ‘Fellowships’ scheme has enabled me to take an additional term of sabbatical leave in order to work on Sir Gawain. Looking further ahead, I hope that my survey of the vocabulary of this important text will sow the seeds for a large-scale, collaborative project to collect words of possibly Scandinavian origin from a great many more Middle English texts.

Congratulations

2010-09-08T04:43:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Dr Denis Casey who has won the 2010 Irish Chiefs' Prize in History, which is awarded by the Council of Irish Chiefs and Chieftains in association with the History Department of Trinity College, Dublin and History Ireland magazine. Dr Casey recently completed a PhD in ASNC and, from October, will be teaching Celtic History in the Department while Dr Fiona Edmonds is on research leave.

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

2010-08-31T04:49:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

From 17th - 20th August, the ASNC Department hosted our first Sutton Trust Summer School in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic. The students who took part came from state schools all over the country, from Barnsley to Ross-on-Wye, Stockport to Peterborough, in order to experience life as an undergraduate at Cambridge. The School began with an introduction to Anglo-Saxon History from Prof. Simon Keynes, followed by an introduction to the Vikings from our Head of Department, Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh. As in the case of real undergraduate study, the information gained in these lectures was then consolidated in small-group supervisions on Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age History, led by PhD students and Junior Research Fellows in the ASNC Department. In the afternoon, Dr Richard Dance introduced the students to the basics of the Old English and Old Norse languages, and again this was consolidated in supervisions which focused on Old English and Old Norse literature.

The second day began with an introduction to medieval Welsh language and literature from Dr Paul Russell. This involved lessons in how to hang a mouse in medieval Welsh (and if this makes no sense to you, I suggest you read the Mabinogi). Afterwards, I gave a seminar on medieval Irish literature, which included some lively discussion on the 'Death of Conchobar'. In the afternoon the students were given a research assignment in the reading room of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, which resulted in some superb presentations on some of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh manuscripts in the Parker collection. The students then had the opportunity to see at first hand the manuscripts they had researched and spoken about.

The final morning included a lecture from Dr Fiona Edmonds on cultural contacts in early medieval Britain and Ireland, followed by supervisions on Celtic History led by post-doctoral researchers in the ASNC Department. The Summer School ended with a session on university admissions, applying to Cambridge, and opportunities for studying medieval culture more widely, which was led by Dr Andrew Bell, an Anglo-Saxon historian who is also Admissions Tutor at Gonville & Caius College. The aim of the Summer School was to offer students a taste of life as an ASNC undergraduate at Cambridge: the disciplinary breadth of the Department is such that the students got an intensive, whistle-stop tour of medieval languages, literature, history and palaeography over the course of a few brief days, but they were unflagging in their enthusiasm, their ability and their dedication. We hope that the Summer School will inspire all the participants to go on to university and to further their interest in the medieval world.

Pictish symbols

2010-08-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Phil Dunshea writes:

The mysterious carved symbol stones which cover Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus have always possessed a rather otherworldly quality. The people who left them – known to the Romans as the Picts, or ‘painted ones’ – disappeared from history in the tenth century, when they were effectively subsumed into the medieval kingdom of Scotland. By the twelfth century the Picts had acquired near-mythical status:

“Who will not espouse love of celestial things and dread of worldly things, if he considers not only that their kings and princes and people have perished, but also that at the same time their whole racial stock, their language and all remembrance of them have disappeared?”

The stones they erected, ornamented with elaborate swirling motifs and wild beasts, are best described as abstract. The examples with more intelligible pictures usually seem to depict conventional aspects of Dark Age aristocratic life: Christianity, hunting, warfare, land ownership and so on. But a new theory, put forward by Professor Rob Lee of Exeter University, suggests that there may be more to it than that. Lee and his team think these symbols might actually be a script, and that the stones are covered with writing. The media has pounced: “New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered”, as the Discovery Channel’s website proclaims. Or “Ancient Language Mystery Deepens”, as the BBC more soberly put it.

Hilton of Cadboll replica (from Wikimedia Commons)

Why the excitement? It’s mainly because the Pictish language has always been something of an enigma. Other than their stones the Picts left very little trace of themselves (there is no surviving Pictish literature, for instance). Bede, a Northumbrian scholar writing at the beginning of the eighth century, makes it quite clear that the Picts did have their own language, but modern scholars have very little to go on in their attempts to work out what it might have looked like. Place-names and the names of Pictish kings (which occasionally appear in medieval texts) suggest that it was a Brittonic language, part of the same family as Welsh. That might imply that the Picts had not always been all that different from the rest of the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of Britain, who once stretched from Cornwall to Lothian. It may only have been with the coming of the Romans, and their famous walls, that anything became distinctively ‘Pictish’. Clearly the Welsh and Pictish languages were different by Bede’s time, perhaps because the latter had been isolated long enough for it to develop along different lines. Without a more extended sample of Pictish writing, however, there is not much more that can be said.

If the new hypothesis is correct then that may not be the end of the story, however, because the hundreds of Pictish stones would represent a huge body of linguistic evidence. Professor Lee and his colleagues wanted to work out if there is any meaningful pattern in the way the various symbols on the stones are laid out. To do so they applied a mathematical law called Shannon’s Entropy, which measures the amount of ‘randomness’ in a given data set. The formulae involved make uncomfortable viewing for most ASNCs (think Η(Χ) = Σp (χi) I (χi) and so on) but the basic aim was to work out whether certain symbols usually follow certain other symbols in a given context. There is, Lee claims, a level of predictability which hints that we are dealing with a language rather than merely with pictures. These stones, in his words, ‘communicated information’.

The jury is still out on these findings. The way Lee approached his evidence in the first place (possibly by lining the symbols up to be read as linear symbols) has already come in for criticism from at least one linguist. And at one level, of course, all pictures ‘communicate information’, hence the proverb about a thousand words. The Pictish sculptors might have been following stylistic formulae, completely lost on us today, which had nothing to do with anything linguistic. Furthermore, as someone else pointed out today, it would have been a ‘bloody hard’ language to write in. One final problem is that proof will be hard to find. Even if this is a script, we might never be able to decipher it. We would need something bilingual, and nothing remotely like that has so far turned up. A stone combining some Pictish symbols with a commentary in Latin or Old Welsh might do for the Pictish language what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Behistun inscriptions for Persian cuneiform. But don’t get your hopes up.

PASE project to be featured in BBC documentary

2010-08-09T07:27:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project, which was undertaken jointly by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge, and King's College, London, is to feature in a BBC2 documentary on 'Domesday' tomorrow at 8pm, as part of the BBC's 'Norman Season'. Further details about the project can be found on Cambridge University's news page.

The Best Statue in Cambridge

2010-07-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

Proof that there's more to ASNC than just Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic: Hugo Gye, who graduated this summer with a B.A. (Hons) in ASNC, features in the current issue of Cambridge University's award-winning alumni magazine, CAM. Hugo's contribution is the latest in a series of articles in which undergraduates write about their favourite piece of art in Cambridge. Hugo chose the statue of Lord Byron, which is located in the Wren Library at Trinity College, and he writes eloquently in praise of the 'lazy, drunken, hedonistic' student (not that we encourage that sort of thing in ASNC, of course). The magazine can be downloaded here, and Hugo's article in on p.13.

Statue of Lord Byron, Trinity College, Cambridge

ASNC Open Day

2010-07-09T02:01:00.000-07:00

On 23rd June ASNC welcomed more than sixty potential applicants and their parents to our departmental Open Day, which was held in the English Faculty Building on West Road and in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. Senior members of the ASNC Department gave short talks on the various papers available to our undergraduates, from Old Norse to Palaeography, Celtic Philology to Anglo-Saxon History. There were also talks on various aspects of the University's admissions process. After that, our visitors had the opportunity to see a number of Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh manuscripts at the Parker Library, including the Corpus Glossary (an early ninth-century manuscript containing a glossary in Latin and Old English, which provides some of the earliest evidence for the Old English language), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a Latin copy of the medieval Welsh law texts known as Cyfraith Hywel.

CCCC MS 197B, an eighth-century gospelbook (image from http://parkerweb.stanford.edu)

In addition to our departmental Open Day, we also had a stand in the Law Faculty at the main University Open Days (on 1st and 2nd July), and over the course of those two days dozens more potential applicants dropped in to the Department to find out about what we do. We hope that many of the people who visited us over the course of the Open Days will be joining the Department as new undergraduates in October 2011.

Woruldhord Project at Oxford University

2010-07-05T02:19:00.000-07:00

Anna Caughey writes:

On behalf of Dr Stuart Lee and the Oxford University Faculty of English, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Woruldhord Project, which opened on the 1st of July 2010 and is now receiving submissions.

The Woruldhord Project is a joint initiative of the Oxford University Computing Services and the Faculty of English. It aims to combine the expertise of literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, art historians and linguists together with material from museums, historical sites and members of the general public to create a comprehensive online archive of written, visual and audio-visual material related to Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period.

The Project is currently inviting contributions from anyone researching or teaching on the Anglo-Saxon period at a university level. We are particularly interested in images, audio/video recordings, handouts, essays, articles, presentations, spreadsheets, databases, course notes, lesson plans and materials used in undergraduate teaching, but welcome submissions of any type.

Any material submitted will be made freely available worldwide for educational purposes on the Project Woruldhord website, hosted by the University of Oxford. However, all intellectual property rights in the material will be retained by the contributor, contributors will be named on the site, and all visitors will be provided with a citation guide enabling them to properly acknowledge the authors of the resources. Contributors can also, if desired, attach links to their own or their University’s website to their contributions,
increasing their own web presence.

Timed to correspond with renewed public interest in the Anglo-Saxons following the recent discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, this project presents an excellent opportunity to apply computing technology to the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, history and culture. It also aims to allow members of the public across the world to access rare or difficult-to-obtain material as well as the expertise of specialists in the field. We hope that academics and teachers are willing to share this material, especially if they feel it will be of benefit to the discipline. The Woruldhord Project follows on from the Great War Archive, a very successful project which
collected manuscript material, letters and other materials from the First World War from March-November 2008.

To submit material to the project, simply visit http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord. This page will take you through the simple-to-use submission process where you can upload your object and provide some basic information about it. Other pages that may be of interest include: the main website, the project blog, our 'help' section including a 'how to get started guide' and an FAQ, and a discussion group for the project

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email the project at: woruldhord@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Thanks in advance for any contributions you may send!

Film Review: or, why ASNC is good (or possibly bad) for your health

2010-06-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

Velda Elliott writes:

It might have been a mistake, but a friend dragged me to see Russell Crowe as Robin Hood recently. She loved it. As an ex-mediaeval historian I had a few more problems: specifically my blood pressure. I know it was set just outside ASNaC’s jurisdiction, but there’s definitely some transferable knowledge.

Now, I understand that they almost certainly had an historical consultant – after all they did get right the fact that chain mail weighs a tonne. Well, okay, maybe three stone, as if you were running around all day with a small child strapped to your back. Robin has to ask Marian to help him off with it before he can bathe. The fact that later in the film Cate Blanchett, a twig of a woman who has most certainly not spent years growing used to the weight, manages to turn up to battle in full chainmail and then fight – hey, I’m not even going to go there. Some romantic licence must be allowed.

Russell Crowe as Robin Hood

So they almost certainly did have an historical consultant, even if they did ignore eighty, eighty-five per cent of what s/he said. Let’s not go into calling the king ‘Your Majesty’ 350 years early, burning a body instead of burying it, wielding a broadsword one-handed, or the boats which needed another 500 years to be invented. I did have an actual head-slapping moment when King John refused to sign the Magna Carta, because, actually, in fact, sorry, he DID ACTUALLY SIGN! The woman sitting next to me looked a bit startled.

But only a bit, because I’d already sat up, raised my hands and gone ‘What?!’ about twenty minutes earlier, when the army Robin and the Barons had raised to fight off the invading French (!) managed to get from the Chilterns to the White Cliffs of Dover in a very short space of time, galloping their poor horses all the way. Those horses must have been knackered. Because it wasn’t even the mediaeval historian in me that was really cross – it was the bit of me that wondered why the producers hadn’t even bothered to buy a simple thing that could have made a real difference – a map.

Peterborough: hate to break it to you – not a city in the north. Also if you’re going to ride around the Northern cities pillaging and burning, you probably want to do it in a logical order. One that doesn’t involve riding backwards and forwards across the top of the country in a highly wasteful way. But then, I guess if you’ve invented time travel then you can afford to waste time and energy riding from Peterborough up to York and back down to Nottingham before nipping to Barnsley - we know they have time travel because they managed to burn the stone Minster in York about a hundred and fifty years before work began on it.

But it was afterwards, outside, as I ranted and raved to my friend that something occurred to me. “I’m glad I didn’t do ASNaC,” she said. “I really enjoyed that film.” But so did I – and the only reason for it was the blood pressure hikes caused by my ASNaC sensibilities. Because frankly, in the bits I wasn’t getting angry, I was getting bored. And let’s face it, it’s not every time a trip to the cinema turns into a full cardio workout. So there you have it. ASNaC is good for your health.

Cath Cnucha: a twenty-first century adaptation

2010-06-16T02:56:00.000-07:00

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting pupils from the City of London Academy – Islington and the Central Foundation Boys’ School who came to Corpus Christi College to find out about university life, and about applying to study at Cambridge. After a series of events and lunch organised by Corpus's Admissions Tutor, Dr Melanie Taylor, I had the opportunity to offer pupils a taster lecture, so that they could experience one of the more unusual subjects one can study at Cambridge, namely Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic.

Some of the wonderful pupils from the Central Foundation Boys' School

We discussed some ideas about 'translation', and how the act of translating an historical source can break down barriers, both linguistic and cultural, and shed new light on the past. But we also talked about the way one chooses to translate a text, and how that can open up the text to new audiences (both Ciaran Carson's translation of The Táin [Penguin: 2007] and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf [Faber & Faber: 2002] are good examples of this).

Creative talents from City of London Academy - Islington

This talented bunch of pupils then worked together to create a modern-day reworking of the eleventh-century fíanaigecht text, Cath Cnucha. Developing the idea that the fían was the medieval Irish version of the modern-day gang, the pupils re-wrote the story of Cath Cnucha in twenty-first century slang. Their sparkling (and witty) adaptation can be read in full here:

Murni was Tadhg’s hot daughter. Bare men wanted her. Cumall was the head of a gang’s son and tried to get it on with Murni, but he got rejected. So Cumall raped her.

Pupils from the City of London Academy - Islington (with me hiding in the second row)

Murni’s dad went to Cond. He was pissed off when he was told what had happened. Cond gave Cumall a choice by saying you either leave – fall back – or bring Tadhg’s daughter back. Cumall said I’ll give everything but the girl. Cond sent his boys to beat up Cumall.

Pupils from the Central Foundation Boys' School - deep in thought about medieval Irish literature

Cumall got his mandems, they ‘ad beef ting. My guy got decked, and his guys got merked. Goll was pissed; his eye was doost. This is why my guy was tagged one-eye.

After that, Murni went to Cond for back-up coz her Dad kicked her out, coz she was pregnant. Then her Dad told his boys to burn her. But he was too shook of Cond. Cond then sent Murni to a friend’s yard, just in case init. She jammed there until she had a baby boy, Finn. Finn grew up there, until he was old enough to run tings, against anyone who was waste.[1]

Finn went to Tadhg, his marge’s papz. And said come on let’s get it cracking, one on one, or a rumble. Or you give me some cake for my dead dad. They made a decision, and Tadhg said low it, u can have my ends. Finn made that his main crib. And Finn gave some gwap to his boy Goll cos he only one eye init. It was all bless, until beef started over some animal.

Literary talent from the Central Foundation Boys' School

I would like to thank all the pupils and teachers from the City of London Academy - Islington and the Central Foundation Boys' School for bringing their creativity and talent to the project of reviving the fíanaigecht genre, and particularly to those who bravely and enthusiastically got up in front of their peers to offer their unique and energetic performance of their new translation.

[1] Alternative recension: ‘Next yeah, Murni went to Cond to get boys, but her father dissed her, not let her come back yard coz she got bowned. Her dad called her a sket; told his guys to light her. Cond sent Murni to his friends’ hideout. She jammed at her mate’s yard till she gave birth. Finn, the baby, grew up until he was old enough to cause beef.’

Parchment, Print and PHP: ASNC Leading the Way

2010-06-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

A recent report on how university research in the arts and humanities is serving society (and how its impact may be effectively measured), undertaken by the not-for-profit policy research organisation RAND Europe, has singled out ASNC's Early Irish Glossaries Project for praise.

Under the heading Research Can Have Planned and Unplanned Impacts, the report highlights the impact that the purpose-built database of that three-year project (undertaken by Dr Paul Russell, Dr Pádraic Moran and Dr Sharon Arbuthnot) has had.

There are often unexpected impacts from a research project. For example, in the Faculty of English, an AHRC-funded project on medieval Irish glossaries developed a sophisticated database which had the unanticipated impact of becoming a model for other such databases in other fields.

The report was commissioned jointly by the University of Cambridge and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

ASNC Open Day

2010-06-03T05:50:00.000-07:00

The Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will be holding an Open Day for prospective undergraduates (parents welcome too!) on 23rd June. Details, and a booking form, can be found here. Senior members of the department will give introductory talks on each of the various papers offered as part of the ASNC degree, and there will be a buffet lunch. In addition, there will be a trip to a College library, with an opportunity to see an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic manuscripts. Booking for this event is essential. However, there is also the opportunity to visit the department more informally as part of the University's general admission Open Days on 1st and 2nd July; there is no need to formally book for the July events, although we would be grateful if you could let us know in advance if you plan to visit us.

Recent Discoveries for Anglo-Saxon England

2010-05-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

Important new research by ASNC Department members Prof. Simon Keynes and Dr Rosalind Love is highlighted in Cambridge University's Research Horizons newsletter this month. As Research Horizons puts it:

Recent headlines might give the impression that to strike Anglo-Saxon gold you need a metal detector but, as ASNC academics Professor Simon Keynes and Dr Rosalind Love discovered, there’s still plenty awaiting the historians and literary scholars who depend on texts.

When a 14th-century compilation of historical materials that had lain undiscovered in the library of the Earl of Devon for centuries went under the hammer at Sotheby’s, an eagle-eyed expert (and former ASNC graduate student) spotted that it contained a copy of a much older and incredibly rare text. It was the Encomium Emmae Reginae, a highly charged polemic written on behalf of Queen Emma, wife of King Æthelred the Unready and then of King Cnut, in 1041. But, unlike the only other surviving copy, it was preserved here in a version with a different ending, added after the accession of her son Edward the Confessor in 1042. Coincidentally, a related discovery was made in Oxford, where papers of a 16th-century antiquary were found to include a long-lost section from a biography of King Edward, written soon after his death in 1066.

Both ‘new’ texts have now been studied closely at ASNC, and interpreted in relation to each other. ‘The variant ending of the Encomium is rather explosive in its implications for our understanding of how Edward’s accession was perceived by contemporaries, spinning it as the longed-for restoration of the Anglo-Saxon royal line,’ explained Professor Keynes. ‘And it provides the perfect context for understanding a poem, now fully recovered, which describes a magnificent ship given to Edward at precisely that time,’ added Dr Love.

Prof. Keynes and Dr Love are publishing their study of this important new material in the forthcoming volume of the journal Anglo-Saxon England and this can already be accessed online (or purchased by those who do not have institutional access to Cambridge journals).

15th Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium

2010-05-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

Ronni Phillips writes:

The Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium took place last Saturday, 22nd May. It was held in the Old Music Room at St John’s College, Cambridge, with a dinner afterwards in the Upper Hall, Peterhouse. The Colloquium is a conference for postgraduate students from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, held alternately at each institution, and is now in its fifteenth year. This year there were eight speakers, four from Oxford and four from Cambridge, representing a variety of disciplines within the Celtic Studies field.

The programme was as follows:

11am: Tea and Coffee, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Session 1
Chair: Veronica Phillips

11.30: Kelly Kilpatrick (Oxford), ‘The Medieval Perceptions of the Pre-Christian ‘cemeteries’ of Ireland: a Toponymic Analysis of Senchas na Relec, Aided Nath Í ocus Adnacol and Related Dindshenchus’.

12.00: Dr Denis Casey (Cambridge), ‘Sources for the Annals of Clonmacnoise’.

12.30: Patrick Wadden (Oxford), ‘Cath Ruis na Ríg: Literature and History in the Twelfth Century’.

1.00: Lunch, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Oxford-Cambridge Celtic Colloquium 2010

Session 2
Chair: Robert Crampton

2.30: Angela Grant (Oxford), ‘Rith and Anyan: the Nature of Magical Transformation in Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi’.

3.00: Kelly Randall (Cambridge), ‘(Re-)defining Translation Style: Structure and Variation in Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys’.

3.30: Owain Wyn Jones (Oxford), ‘Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer/The Prophecy of Myrddin and Gwenddydd his Sister’.

4:00 Tea and Coffee, Old Music Room, St John’s College

Session 3
Chair: Jon Wolitz

4.30: Natalia Petrovskaia (Cambridge), ‘The Origins of Delw y Byd’.

5.00: Philip Dunshea (Cambridge), ‘The Sub-Roman Afterlife of the Hadrian’s Wallforts’.

7.00: Dinner, Upper Hall, Peterhouse

Vacancy in the ASNC Department

2010-05-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Teaching Associate in Modern Irish

Applications are invited for a part-time post in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, available from 1 September 2010. The successful applicant will be expected to teach Modern Irish language to University students at all levels, develop online resources to support this teaching, and contribute as a member of the team to the scholarly life of the Department. A good first degree and relevant postgraduate qualification are essential, as well as a good understanding of IT as it relates to language teaching and learning. Given the strong research culture in the Department, developing research activity commensurate with stage of career is desirable. Further particulars can be downloaded from here or obtained from the Departmental Secretary at 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP.

Applications, including a curriculum vitae, completed PD18 (Parts I and III), covering letter and the names of three referees should be sent to the Departmental Secretary at the above address by the closing date. Referees should also be asked to write directly to the same address by the closing date.

Quote Reference: GH05389, Closing Date: 15 June 2010
Planned interview date: 28 June 2010

The University values diversity and is committed to equality of opportunity.
The University has a responsibility to ensure that all employees are eligible to live and work in the UK.

Hidden Treasures in the Cambridge University Library

2010-05-18T02:29:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

In a previous post, Dr Elizabeth Boyle drew attention to the wealth of ASNC-related medieval manuscripts housed in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, which were recently digitised as part of the Parker Library on the Web project. Thanks to that project, the Parker Library's collection is now not only the best-known in Cambridge but also the most accessible (on this, see the recent audio slideshow on the BBC News website). The Parker Library, however, is not the only repository of such valuable material. Other Cambridge libraries also contain many interesting (and sometimes overlooked) manuscripts, not least the Cambridge University Library. To illustrate my point, let's look at one Irish manuscript in Cambridge University Library: a nineteenth-century paper miscellany, now sporting the fetching title of 'Additional MS 4182'.

Additional MS 4182, whose contents vary greatly in age and genre, contains a little something for everyone interested in Irish studies. Excerpts from the ninth-century Triads sit comfortably alongside poems ascribed to the eighteenth-century Jacobite master poet Seán Clárach mac Domhnaill, whose work has been performed in recent years by a collection of Irish and Scottish musicians and singers on BBC Four's Highland Sessions and in alternating Irish and English stanzas in a wonderful collaborative recording by Sting and The Chieftains. Alternatively, for those whose interests lie in analysis of the Irish language, grammatical sections like Ga mhéad rann san oraid? ('How many divisions in speech?') may prove interesting.

Other gems in this manuscript include two copies of an anecdote explaining the origins of the name Ó Súilleabháin (O'Sullivan), which appear to be a version of a story Míchél Ó Cléirigh recorded at the end of his copy of the Life of Saint Ruadán of Lothra (Plummer, ed. & trans., Bethada náem nÉrenn: Lives of Irish Saints, I, 329 & II, 319-20). In this anecdote, a druid named Lobán came to Eochuadh mac Máolura and made exorbitant demands of him, including that he give the druid one of his eyes! Eochuad, fearing that refusal of Lobán would result in dishonour, plucked out one of his own eyes and gave it to the druid. Saint Ruadán avenged Eochuadh by causing Lobán's eyes to replace Eochuadh's, hence the name Súilleabháin, i.e Súile Lobáin ('Lobán's eyes' - a play on súil amháin 'one-eyed'?) stuck to Eochuadh and his descendants.

The contents of Additional MS 4182 are not confined to amusing anecdotes and vignettes. A seemingly separate book bound into the volume contains a lengthy text entitled Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir ('The Conquests of Charlemagne'), a late medieval Irish translation of an eleventh-/twelfth-century Latin original. Douglas Hyde edited and translated Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir for the Irish Texts Society in 1919, but does not appear to have known about (or at least he did not make reference to) the Cambridge copy. Who knows whether this copy may represent a previously unrecognised recension of Gabháltais Shéarlais Mhóir? Even if there is nothing new in it, it still may broaden our knowledge of manuscript dissemination of that text.

Cambridge University Library Additional MS 4182 is just one of a substantial number of Irish manuscripts in Cambridge, which, although catalogued, have yet to be explored in depth (the Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries was compiled by Máire Herbert and Pádraig de Brún and published by Cambridge University Press in 1986). Hopefully this brief note will show that, like an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, the Cambridge collections contain a vast amount of material just waiting to be properly exploited ...

Ireland in Cambridge

2010-04-30T08:22:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

This week Cambridge has been a hive of Irish-related activity. Events began on Monday with a seminar given to the Medieval Archaeology group at the McDonald Institute by Dr Kieran O'Connor, of the National University of Ireland Galway, on élite Gaelic settlements in Ireland in the high Middle Ages. This was followed by the Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, organised by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic in assocation with Hughes Hall, which this year was given by Prof. Marie-Therese Flanagan of Queen's University, Belfast. Prof. Flanagan spoke on the twelfth-century ecclesiastical reform movement in Ireland, highlighting Ireland's manifold connections with England and continental Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Prof. Flanagan noted the poor survival rate of sources from Ireland itself at this time, and pointed out that the very good survival rate of evidence from centres such as Canterbury may lead us to overestimate the importance of that Metropolitan See for the ecclesiastical reform movement, in comparison with other potentially significant centres, such as the Regensburg Schottenkloster, from which fewer sources survive.

One of the few reform documents to have survived from Ireland is Gille (Gilbert) of Limerick's De statu ecclesiae, one copy of which survives in a Durham manuscript, and the other surviving copy of which is now preserved in Cambridge University Library and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Prof. Flanagan spoke in detail about Gille's tract, identifying a number of its sources and their links to the Continental reform movement, and she also highlighted Gille's emphasis on reform at the parish level, and his focus on priests and on women.

Cormac's Chapel, Cashel - the architectural embodiment of ecclesiastical reform in Ireland

On the same occasion as Prof. Flanagan's erudite lecture, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic also celebrated the publication of last year's Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Colmán Etchingham, National University of Ireland Maynooth, entitled The Irish 'Monastic Town': Is this a Valid Concept? The lecture is available from our Departmental Secretary for a modest sum, and its publication was launched by our Head of Department, Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, in the presence of the cultural attaché of the Irish Embassy in London, Mr Ciaran Byrne.

As if this was not enough, Monday's events were followed by a fascinating seminar as part of the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies series, which meets regularly at Magdalene College under the direction of Prof. Eamon Duffy. At this most recent seminar, Dr Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail, of University College Dublin, spoke about the prolific scribal culture which existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Indeed, aside from Iceland, one would be hard-pressed to think of another region in which scribal culture enjoyed such vibrant and creative life so late into the modern age. Dr Ní Úrdail's paper focused in particular on one text ('The Battle of Clontarf') which exists in almost ninety different modern manuscript copies, and she demonstrated the creative engagement of the scribes who copied the text, resulting in virtually every manuscript copy of the text containing textual variants to a greater or lesser degree (thus rendering her task, as editor of the text, that much more difficult!).

Our Irish week continued with Dr Deborah Hayden, Lecturer in Modern Irish in the Department, giving a seminar on 'Poetic Law and the Medieval Irish Linguist' at Hughes Hall on Wednesday, and that is followed today by Dr Denis Casey, who will be giving a Research Seminar to ASNC on his work towards a new critical edition of the 'Annals of Clonmacnoise'. It has been an exhausting but intellectually stimulating and immensely rich week, and is testimony to the strength and diversity of medieval Irish studies in Cambridge.

The early medieval world rocks.

2010-04-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

From Christopher Lee's Charlemagne-themed concept album, to the Wild Beast's contemporary take on the Exeter Book poem Wulf and Eadwacer, we applaud manifestations of early medieval culture in modern music. Any suggestions of classic ASNC-related songs or albums gratefully received (aside from the entire genre of folk metal), but in the meantime, here's the great Christopher Lee talking about his Charlemagne album:

Note: Staffordshire Hoard documentary

2010-04-12T04:08:00.000-07:00

A documentary about the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard will be broadcast this evening at 9pm on Channel 4.

Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture 2010, in association with Hughes Hall

2010-04-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

On Monday 26th April, at 5.45pm, the 2010 Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture will take place in the Pavillion Room at Hughes Hall, Cambridge.

Prof. Marie Therese Flanagan, Professor of Medieval History at Queen's University, Belfast, will speak on:
Reform in the twelfth-century Irish Church: a revolution of outlook?

The Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture is given annually, in association with Hughes Hall, in memory of Kathleen Hughes who, at the time of her death in 1977, was Reader in Celtic in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge.

Croch Saithir: envisioning Christ on the Cross in the early medieval west

2010-04-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

Last week I was in Cork for a two-day conference on 'envisioning Christ on the Cross in the early medieval west'. This was organised as part of a wider research project, currently ongoing at UCC, to explore Christ's Passion as it was understood, depicted, and re-created in early medieval literature, art and liturgical practice. The project has a particular focus on Ireland, in its European context. This was brought out fully at the conference, where it was shown that - contrary to popular misconceptions about the nature of medieval Irish Christianity - developments in Ireland were very much in tune with those elsewhere in Europe. Art historians from Italy, Spain and Germany gave very interesting papers on crucifixion iconography, while liturgists spoke about the role of the narrative of the Passion within the daily rhythms of the Church, particularly in relation to the Eucharist. However, in the interests of brevity I shall focus on the papers of relevance to all things Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic.

'Christ on the Cross', Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, 12th cent.

(from www.highcrosses.org)

The conference opened with a plenary lecture from Jennifer O'Reilly, who spoke on 'The mystery of the cross and the identity of Christ', which was a tour de force of art historical and textual scholarship, focusing on the earliest representations of the Crucifixion in Insular manuscripts. Also of note was Salvador Ryan's fascinating paper on depictions of the Crucifixion in later medieval Gaelic bardic poetry, and Juliet Mullins' re-assessment of the 'Passions and Homilies' in the Leabhar Breac, a fifteenth-century Irish religious miscellany. Carol Neuman de Vegvar re-visited the Blytheburgh Tablet, examining its possible function as a liturgical diptych, and Amy Miller, a doctoral student at Toronto, argued that the Gosforth Crucifixion, an inscribed stone preserved in Cumbria, should be read not as a Christian monument at all, but rather as a Pagan imitation of Christian artistic forms - I expect that the Christian/non-Christian interpretations of the Gosforth sculptural corpus constitute part of a debate that will continue to rage, but Ms Miller made some interesting points regarding whether or not an overtly Christian symbol, such as a cross, would always have been seen by its audience in fully Christian terms. Richard Hawtree's paper on Eriugena's Carmina for Charles the Bald was an excellent reminder that medieval Ireland's greatest philosopher was also a significant poet, whose poetic works deserve wider attention, and Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh's assessment of Crucifixion iconography on Irish Romanesque sculpture raised significant questions about the relationships between episcopal and royal authority in Ireland during the time of the ecclesiastical reform movement of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

All in all, it was a great event, with an extremely high standard of papers. Most significantly, the conference demonstrated Ireland's engagement with, and contributions to, the mainstream of European cultural and artistic trends, as manifested in medieval Christianity's devotion to Christ's suffering on the Cross.

An Irish History of Civilization

2010-03-31T07:08:00.000-07:00

Dr Denis Casey writes:

A recent reading experience has left me with the feeling that perhaps I should emerge from under my cultural rock a little more often. The work that inspired this minor bout of introspection was Don Akenson's large two-volume An Irish History of Civilization (2005). That's right, An Irish History of Civilization; not A History of Irish Civilization. Akenson's intriguing work is not a history of Ireland or Irishness but a presentation of the Irish experience of world history in Talmudic form. In his preface Akenson suggests that his work is 'a collection of fictive short stories or, if you prefer, of Aggadah: very little in the way of Halachah here'.

Even from a purely 'ASNC' point of view his book is full of individually-titled pieces that provoke an examination of how we appreciate the materials with which we work and also our own relationship with them. For example, in 'The Beginning', on the passage graves along the Boyne, he remarks of their creators that 'these are a stone-aged people, but they are as far from being primitive as we are from being civilized' (vol I, p. 59). Certainly food for thought, especially when one reflects on the continuing controversy over the proposed route of the M3 motorway through the Tara-Skreen valley. In 'The Land', Akenson contrasts the pre-modern and modern Irish landscape and suggests that 'you've never been there even if you've lived there all your life' (I, p. 60). His brief tale focuses on changes such as deforestation, widespread enclosure of land, draining of lakes and consumption of bogs and concludes:

The Boyne Valley (from www. mythicalireland.com)

'So all the events that happen before, say, 1600, happen in a theatre that we have never visited, and are outlined against backdrops we can only intuit. When heroic chariot battles occur in the central plains, they are on a topographical scale now impossible to duplicate; when journeys in the northern drumlins and woodlands are mentioned, they take place in a claustrophobic tangle of scree and tree that is no longer tangible; and when an adventurer crosses parts of the far south or far north, he is frequently travelling and travailing across a desert waste where there is no fodder for horses, no grass, all is heather or bog and there are only tiny settlements, most of which the traveller can pass within a mile of and never know are there' (I, pp. 60-1).

One might go to the works of Frank Mitchell (The Shell Guide to Reading the Irish Landscape, Dublin, 1986) or Fergus Kelly (Early Irish Farming: a Study based mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries A.D., Dublin, 2000) for a discussion of the medieval Irish landscape from a more 'scientific' point of view and find a great deal to contradict the details of Akenson's description, but to do so would be to miss the point of this particular piece of Aggadah. It is the overall thrust of the stories that is critical and, as Akenson wryly notes in his prefact, 'as far as mere accuracy is concerned, not all seeming errors in the text are accidental. Sometimes even the immortal Homer only pretended to nod'!

Update: Staffordshire Hoard Saved for the Nation

2010-03-24T04:29:00.000-07:00

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

On 23 March the National Heritage Memorial Fund pledged the final £1.285 million needed to reach the purchase price of £3.3 million set by a Treasure Valuation Committee in November 2009 for the Staffordshire hoard of 1,600 early Anglo-Saxon gold and silver objects. This news comes three weeks ahead of the scheduled deadline for the fundraising campaign. Donations contributing towards this goal have come from a range of sources, including the Art Fund, Birmingham and Stoke city councils and a successful public appeal, one anonymous donor to which gave £50,000.

Despite this important and extremely welcome step, fundraising efforts are set to continue, aiming now for the estimated £1.7 million needed by the hoard's future custodians (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and Stoke Museums) to undertake proper conservation, study and display to the public. Purchase of the hoard for the nation thus hardly marks the end of the interest and activity which it has generated: its acquisition paves the way for detailed investigation and long-term exhibition to begin in earnest.

ASNCs set York alight (literally)

2010-03-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

On Saturday 20th March, members of the ASNC Department were in York to hold a one-day conference on The Early Medieval World, aimed at Year 11 and 12 pupils and their teachers. Despite a slightly inauspicious start, involving a fire in the pub in which we were drinking the night before, and a fire alarm in the early hours of the morning at our hotel, the event itself proved to be a massive success. More than one hundred pupils and teachers - largely from schools in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire, although some had come from London, and even as far afield as Dover - gathered at St Peter's School (we loved the ASNC connection - the school even claims Alcuin as a past headmaster!) for a day of mini-lectures on themes as diverse as cultural contacts in early medieval Yorkshire to the historical Macbeth.

St Peter's School, York, who hosted our event superbly.

Dr Andrew Bell, Tutor for Admissions at Gonville and Caius College, began the day with a talk on 'Thinking about Early Medieval Europe' which addressed wide historical themes, and various approaches to early medieval history. Next, Dr Fiona Edmonds, Lecturer in Celtic History, outlined evidence for British-speaking communities in Anglo-Saxon England as late as the eighth century. Fiona focused particularly on Yorkshire and Lancashire, and engaged the interest of the audience by using toponymic evidence from their own localities to support the argument for a continued British presence well into the Anglo-Saxon period.

After lunch, Dr Debby Banham, an expert in Anglo-Saxon diet, farming and medicine, gave a fascinating insight into everyday life in Anglo-Saxon England, touching on diet, clothing, and shelter. Dr Richard Dance, Senior Lecturer in Old English Language and Literature, gave the audience a highly entertaining, and interactive, introduction to the Old English and Old Norse languages. Lastly, I spoke on medieval Gaelic influences in modern English literature, focusing on the historical Macbeth. A quick glance at the feedback questionnaires suggest that there was a universally positive response to the day, with many pupils and teachers lamenting the fact that they have no opportunity to study medieval history or literature at GCSE or 'A' Level.

The Department would like to say a massive thank you to the two undergraduates, Albert Fenton and Rebecca Wilkinson, who came to York with us, and who spoke to many of the young people who attended, offering them information on everything from university applications to life as an ASNC. They were brilliant, enormously helpful and unfailingly enthusiastic. Thanks guys!

Viking-Age Mass Execution in Dorset

2010-03-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

Construction work in June 2009 on a relief road cutting across Ridgeway Hill, close to Weymouth, Dorset, uncovered the chilling and utterly unexpected remains of what could only be interpreted as a mass execution. In the course of subsequent excavations, 51 skulls were found heaped next to the rest of the remains, which had been dumped haphazardly into a quarry pit. Many of the bones showed evidence of violent, even deadly injuries including blows with edged weapons to the head, jaw and upper spine. Others displayed wounds to the chest, stomach and pelvis, or defensive blows to the hands. All had been young men, aged in their teens or twenties, with a few in their thirties. No evidence of pins, brooches or other items associated with clothing was found, suggesting that the men had been stripped naked either before or after death.

picture from BBC News website

After initial speculation that the remains could have been of Roman or pre-Roman Iron-Age date, radio carbon dating of the remains in July 2009 revealed that they had been killed at some point between AD 910 and 1030. Recent isotopic analysis by NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory of the teeth taken from ten individuals has added another piece to the puzzle. These men had not been brought up eating the food or drinking the water in an area with chalk geology such as Dorset. Rather, they grew up in a climate colder than England's, probably north of the Arctic circle in the case of one individual. They had eaten a high-protein diet comparable with that known from human remains excavated in Sweden. In other words, it is likely that these young men were Scandinavians.

Further details will doubtless emerge concerning this exceptional and grisly discovery, and it is to be hoped that these will allow some sort of conclusion to be reached about what events may have precipitated the slaughter of approximately fifty vikings in Dorset. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle offers a few possible contexts. Dorset was ravaged by vikings in 998, and by Cnut's invading army in 1015. Most famously, in 1002 Æthelred II ordered the death of 'all the Danish men who were in England': the ensuing massacre took place on St Brice's day (13 November). Any or none of these events could lie behind the Ridgeway Hill execution burial. Whatever its background, it is a stark reminder of the real and very bloody violence of the Viking Age which took its toll on Anglo-Saxons and their Scandinavian opponents alike.

Staffordshire Hoard update

2010-03-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

ELB writes:

The ASNC department's very own Prof. Simon Keynes was among the experts invited to view and discuss the Staffordshire Hoard as part of the fundraising campaign, led by the The Art Fund, to raise the money necessary to keep the Hoard in the country. Tony Robinson has an article in today's Sunday Times which discusses it further. Meanwhile, Richard Brooks, in the same newspaper's 'Culture' supplement hints that the National Heritage Memorial Fund may shortly be able to provide around £1.5 million pounds towards the cost of purchasing the Hoard, which could be added to the £1.6 million already raised to date. We await further news.

Report of H. M. Chadwick Lecture 2010

2010-03-12T05:32:00.001-08:00

Ronni Phillips writes:

On Thursday, 11^th March the ASNC Department held the 21^st annual H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture. The lecture was delivered by Professor Joseph F. Nagy of the University of California Los Angeles. Its topic was "Merchants of Myth in Ancient and Medieval Celtic Traditions". Professor Nagy began his lecture with reference to H. M. Chadwick’s work The Heroic Age, which argued that the Celtic literary ‘heroic milieu’ – like other heroic literatures – was peopled only by royal or noble families and their households, but depicted no representatives of merchants, farmers or artisans. These mercantile figures were thus defined as representing a more cosmopolitan ‘medieval’ era, set in opposition to an ancient ‘heroic’ age.

Professor Nagy argued for a more nuanced understanding of representations of merchants and mercantile behaviour in medieval Celtic literature. Drawing on texts ranging widely from the early Irish glossary Sanas Chormaic to the twelfth-century Middle Irish Acallam na Senórach, he noted various depictions of characters engaging in mercantile behaviour, such as negotiating, bargaining and exchanging. He argued that these examples reflected networks of trade, cultural and intellectual exchange that existed prior to Viking – and indeed Roman – settlement. This was not to say that such representations of mercantilism depicted it in an entirely positive light. Rather, Professor Nagy explained that the ambivalence with which negotiating and bargaining for goods and wealth was portrayed in some texts, and the fact that liminal figures such as the Fenians in Acallam na Senórach were often portrayed as displaying mercentile behaviour may have reflected unease about such behaviour. In projecting it onto the marginal Fenians, it kept mercantilism safely Other, while still engaging with it on an intellectual level.

This argument draws on some of Professor Nagy’s earlier research from his book of 1985, The Wisdom of the Outlaw. In that book he noted that fénnidi occupy an uneasy position in medieval Irish literature as ‘social outcasts forever denied adult status’, but whose position as outsiders allows them to gain wisdom not available to fully integrated members of society and bring the benefits of this wisdom back to society. Mercantile behaviour, perhaps, was another such marginal activity – at least within literature – and depicting fénnidi as engaging in it allowed writers to reflect on the benefits of trade and exchange while keeping it safely confined to marginal figures.

Professor Nagy’s Chadwick Lecture will be published by the ASNC Department.

H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture 2010

2010-03-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

The 2010 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Prof. Joseph Falaky Nagy (UCLA) on Thursday 11th March, at 5pm, in Room GR.06/07, in the English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge. Prof. Nagy will be speaking on 'Merchants of Myth in Ancient and Medieval Celtic Traditions'. This is a public lecture - all are welcome - and it will be followed by a wine reception.

(Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients)

Hector Munro Chadwick (1870-1947) was the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge (1912-41). Through the immense range of his scholarly publications, and through the vigorous enthusiasm which he brought to all aspects of Anglo-Saxon studies -- philological and literary, historical and archaeological -- he helped to define the field and give it the interdisciplinary orientation which characterises it still. The Department of ASNC, which owes its existence and its own interdisciplinary outlook to H. M. Chadwick, has wished to commemorate his enduring contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies by establishing an annual series of lectures in his name. The H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture (established in 1990) is delivered by a scholar who is invited to Cambridge for the occasion, on a subjected calculated to be of interest to the whole Department.

Is ASNaC on the rise in popular culture?

2010-03-05T03:20:00.000-08:00

Robin McConnell writes:

The early medieval period has always been an area of exploration for the arts. In painting, sculpure, literature and cinema - in essentially all the creative media - there has been a longstanding tradition of appropriation of the medieval period as context for storytelling and entertainment. But it would be fair to say that the use of the early middle ages (or the "ASNaC period", as I like to think of it) in the arts has always been a sub-genre at best in any media; often it is so low-profile that you might call it an underground movement. Let's face it, how many people would recognise an early medieval novel that is neither Lord of the Rings or The Once and Future King if it came up in conversation? And neither of those can even be classed as 'early medieval' in the traditional sense, since they are not concerned with accurately representing the period, either historically or culturally. Likewise with films, the early medieval period has largely been overlooked. There are one or two lesser-known classics, such as 1958's The Vikings and 1952's Ivanhoe, but the fame of most films set in the early middle ages has been restricted to cult status. Even when 'blockbusters' as recent as the noughties have been made set in that period, they have usually been met with commercial and critical disappointment: take 1999's The 13th Warrior, 2004's King Arthur or 2007's Beowulf as prime examples of big-budget Hollywood treatment of the ASNaC period floundering in lukewarm critical reception and mediocre box-office takings. Such failures in the past have condemned the genre to low-budget and therefore mostly low-quality fare like Siege of the Saxons (1963) and Beowulf and Grendel (2005). Incidentally, 2007's Beowulf is fast developing a cult and has enjoyed considerable success in DVD sales.

The Secret of Kells

But the mainstream status of the ASNaC period on film could be about to change over the next few years. 2009's The Secret of Kells has proved to be the little-film-that-could: like many films of the ASNaC genre, and of British and Irish cinema more generally, it is a low-budget effort. The film puts a supernatural, rather quaint spin on the reality of medieval life, and has received a very limited run in cinemas, enjoying mild commercial success. However, it has defied all expectations and landed a nomination for Best Animated Film at this year's Academy Awards in Hollywood: the highest accolade it could hope to achieve. The results of the Oscar's will be announced this Sunday, so we'll have to wait and see if it achieves the award. But what is perhaps more significant is that news of The Secret of Kells's Oscar nomination has coincided with the announcement of numerous other ASNaC period film projects. Coming this month is Dreamwork's How to Train your Dragon, while coming later in the year are Centurion and Valhalla Rising, as well as the more old-fashioned Ironclad, plus an untitled Viking project by Mel Gibson which will start in production soon. And just for good measure, there are two Arthurian projects on the horizon: one 'original' take on the legend (possibly to be directed by Guy Ritchie) and a remake of 1981's Excalibur. With the exception of How to Train your Dragon, all of these projects have stated their intention to be faithful to the period, both in terms of visual accuracy and their representation of early medieval culture. Could this mark the beginning of a new era of popular but accurate ASNaC period films?

Personally, my money's on the Mel Gibson project. He has already directed three historical 'action' films, most (in)famously Braveheart (for which he won the Best Director Oscar) and later The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. Although I love Braveheart, it is the latter two films that were particularly impressive, combining wonderfully evocative visual detail and as-accurate-as-possible historical languages. Moreover, they were good solid films in their own right, which won commercial and cult success. Of his latest project Gibson has promised "it's going to be in the English that would have been spoken back then, and Old Norse, whatever the ninth century had to offer. I'm going to give you real." After Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, I believe him: the scale of budget he can muster, plus his ability to construct a good film that appeals to a wide audience, could finally produce the kind of mouth-wateringly accurate and entertaining ASNaC film we haven't seen since The Name of the Rose in 1986. I'm not asking for non-fiction storylines, but simply for good films. Hopefully, if the upcoming wave of ASNaC films proves successful (both critically and commercially), then ASNaC itself might enjoy its own renaissance, and may get to the point where it is as accepted and widely-known as science. Or at least Lord of the Rings.

But we'll have to wait and see.

Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic

Call for Papers: Transmission, Translation and Dissemination in the European Middle Ages, 1000 - 1500

In search of Carn Droma: exploring the boundaries between Picts and Gaels

Giant squid spotted in Iceland?

Junctions and Crossroads: Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic 2012

Outreach and widening participation

Cultures in Contact: Conference for Teachers interested in the Medieval World

ASNC-related news stories

Varia

Public lecture in ASNC

Insular Economics - Workshop Report

Festival of Ideas

More ASNC-related news stories

ASNC-related news stories

Converting the Isles

Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards

Obituaries for Mark Blackburn

Memories of Old Awake

New book!

Dr Mark Blackburn

Insular Economics: programme and abstracts

Call for Papers: Power and the Sacred in the Medieval World

Insular Economics: Ireland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Peter’s Pence and Beyond: Monetary Links between Anglo-Saxon England and Rome

More congratulations!

Widening participation

Congratulations!

—•—• ••— •— —•—• •••• ("cuach")

Adventures in a graveyard, Part 2

ASNC Open Day 2011

ASNC in the media

Ryan Giggs' super-injunction: the ASNC perspective

Open Resources for Celtic

Report of Chadwick Lecture

Film Review: "Thor" - for Better or Norse?

Adventures in a graveyard

Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture

Authorities and Adaptations

ASNC on TV

Seachtain na Gaeilge report

Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas - Colloquium Report

Seachtain na Gaeilge, so far ...

ASNC Hosts Viking Society Student Conference

Seachtain na Gaeilge in Cambridge

Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas - Programme

‘A Land without Shortcuts’ — 2011 Parnell Lecture in Irish Studies

The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past

Another ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship!

Parker Library blog and CCASNC

CFP: Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas

Chadwick Memorial Lecture 2011

ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

Medieval Furness: Texts and Contexts

Dr Mark Blackburn on Radio 4 tomorrow

Digital Resource for Palaeography

CFP: Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas

2010 Quiggin Memorial Lecture

Author, authority and books in Benevento

Public lecture in ASNC

ASNC on Radio 4

Snorri is my homeboy

The Saga-Steads of Iceland: A 21st-Century Pilgrimage

Festival of Ideas - Saturday 23rd October

Life after ASNC

Dates for your diary

Icelandic at Cambridge

Modern Irish Classes 2010-11

Modern Glosses

Investigating Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches

The influence of Old Norse on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Congratulations

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

Pictish symbols

PASE project to be featured in BBC documentary

The Best Statue in Cambridge

ASNC Open Day

Woruldhord Project at Oxford University

Film Review: or, why ASNC is good (or possibly bad) for your health

Cath Cnucha: a twenty-first century adaptation