'A Pamphlet Composed to Bolster a Fiction'? St Eadburg and Canterbury

Alumnae and alumni of the department who read CAM magazine will happily have absorbed the article by Dr Rosalind Love in this term's issue. For everyone else, we point you to the magazine's website, where the current issue can be read online or downloaded for free. In 'Wars of the Word' (pp. 35-37), Dr Love tells of her research into the deeply intriguing Life of Saint Eadburg, a Latin text preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript from the cathedral library at Hereford, but which shows tantalising similarities with the work of a much earlier writer.

ASNCs on University Challenge

At least four current and former ASNCs have squared up to Jeremy Paxman on the current series of University Challenge. In the episode broadcast on Monday 14th October, recent ASNC graduates Owain Jones and Daisy Le Helloco helped Bangor defeat Aberystwyth. Their victory, together with Paxman's entertainingly inconsitent pronunciation of Aberystwyth, can be seen on BBC i-Player here until Monday 21st October.

Charter for ten?

Meanwhile, back in August, ASNC second-year Rachael Gregory helped Queens' College to a close-fought victory over Durham. The final score was 190-170. Congratulations, Rachael! A few weeks later, Lizzie Colwill, another second-year, gave a fine performance for Pembroke against Somerville College, Oxford. We are very proud of both of them.

More recent ASNC news

Dr Brittany Schorn has been appointed Research Associate on the Interpreting Eddic Poetry project at St John's College Research Centre, University of Oxford, from 1st October 2013.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle has been appointed Lecturer in Early Irish at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, from 1st September 2013.

And, in the recent round of senior academic promotions, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and Dr Fiona Edmonds have been appointed to a Readership and a Senior Lectureship respectively, in the Department of ASNC.

Congratulations all round!

Some recent news

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, ASNC alumna and recent PhD graduate, now at the University of Oxford, who has recently been announced as one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers. This initiative, run in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will allow Eleanor to bring her research on the worldview of the medieval Icelanders to a wider audience.

Congratulations also to Dr Philip Dunshea, a PhD graduate of ASNC, who studied as an undergraduate with Dr Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews, and who has recently been appointed to a temporary lectureship in Celtic History here in the Department of ASNC. Phil will be covering the teaching of Dr Fiona Edmonds, while she is on maternity leave (congratulations Fiona!).

And finally, while we wouldn't normally allow commercial advertising here on the ASNC blog, we must make a brief mention of recent ASNC alumnus, George Potts, who stars in a new advert for Virgin trains. We'll try to resist the urge to make a joke about ASNCs going far ...

New Website on Medieval Welsh Law (Cyfraith Hywel)

Prof. Paul Russell notes:

A new website has been launched on Medieval Welsh law. This examines all aspects of medieval Welsh law, and includes bibliographies, discussions, details about the manuscripts, sections on Aneurin Owen’s Ancient Laws, and much more. This work is the result of a research project led by Dr Sara Elin Roberts, with ASNC graduate Bryn Jones as a research assistant; the project was funded by the Publications and Research Committee of the University of Wales, with the work of creating the website funded by the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. The website also represents the work of Seminar Cyfraith Hywel, and announcements of the meetings of the Seminar, new publications, and related matters will be included on the website from now on.

Illuminating the Middle Ages debate, Battle of Ideas 2012

Three ASNCs past and present, namely recent graduate Albert Fenton; Dr Levi Roach (Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Exeter); and Dr Elizabeth Boyle (Affiliated Lecturer in ASNC and Research Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge), teamed up with cultural commentator Lindsay Johns to discuss the significance of the Middle Ages at the Battle of Ideas 2012 at London's Barbican. You can watch the video here:

Old English Riddles

Recent ASNC PhD graduates, Dr Matthias Ammon and Dr Megan Cavell, are pleased to announce their new blog, The Riddle Ages. Stemming in part from their participation in the department’s exciting Old English Reading Group, Ammon and Cavell have embarked upon the ambitious task of providing open access translations and commentary for every riddle in the Exeter Book. The hope is that this blog will act as a teaching and reference tool for those learning Old English, offer an easily accessible list of potential riddle-solutions for researchers and provide insight into these fascinating poems for interested members of the public.

Below is an example of the first post for Riddle 1:

Hwylc is hæleþa þæs horsc      ond þæs hygecræftig

þæt þæt mæge asecgan,      hwa mec on sið wræce,

þonne ic astige strong,      stundum reþe,

þrymful þunie,      þragum wræce

5   fere geond foldan,      folcsalo bærne,

ræced reafige?      Recas stigað,

haswe ofer hrofum.      Hlin bið on eorþan,

wælcwealm wera,      þonne ic wudu hrere,

bearwas bledhwate,      beamas fylle,

10   holme gehrefed,      heahum meahtum

wrecen on waþe,      wide sended;

hæbbe me on hrycge      þæt ær hadas wreah

foldbuendra,      flæsc ond gæstas,

somod on sunde.      Saga hwa mec þecce,

15   oþþe hu ic hatte,      þe þa hlæst bere.

Who among heroes is so sharp and so skilled in mind

that he may declare who presses me on my journey,

when I rise up, mighty, sometimes savage,

full of force, I resound, at times I press on,

5   travel throughout the land, I burn the people’s hall,

plunder the palace? The reek rises,

grey to the roofs. There is a clamour on the earth,

the slaughter-death of men, when I shake the forest,

the quick-growing groves, topple trees,

10   sheltered by the sea, pressed into wandering

by the powers on high, sent afar;

I have on my back that which earlier covered each rank

of the earth-dwellers, flesh and spirit,

swimming together. Say what covers me,

15   or how I am called, who bear that burden.

See the original blog post for possible solutions!

Jersey coin hoard

The discovery of a huge hoard of Gaulish and Roman coins in Jersey has hit the headlines recently. An interesting overview of the hoard and its significance is given by ASNC alumna Carly Hilts in Current Archaeology. Further press coverage can be found in the Guardian, the Independent and on the BBC News website.

Dr Rory Naismith, a numismatics expert based in ASNC, gives us some further context for the find:

Coinage was already well known among the pre-Roman peoples of what is now France and Britain long before the Roman conquest. Gold, electrum, silver and base-metal pieces were all made in large volume, many of them bearing rich and artistically accomplished designs. Some also carry the names of kings or mint-places. This major find sheds light on the scale of the Iron-Age currency, and on interaction with the Roman world around the time of Caesar's campaigns in Gaul (c. 50 BC). It constitutes the largest collection of Iron-Age coins ever found, containing approximately 50,000 Iron-Age copper-alloy and silver pieces, along with some Roman pieces. Most of the Iron-Age coins were probably made in Armorica, the region of Gaul now known as Brittany and Normandy. Importantly, its finders - who had been searching with metal-detectors - alerted local archaeological authorities when the nature of the discovery became clear. The hoard was subsequently excavated with all due care, and will be examined thoroughly in a controlled context. It promises to be a major resource for a period when archaeological sources (including coinage) are the principal form of evidence.

Dr Paul Russell, our Head of Department, whose research interests include the Continental Celtic languages, such as Gaulish, adds:

Gaulish tribes acquired literacy as a result of contact with first Greek and then Roman scripts in the second and first centuries BC. Numerous inscriptions, some very lengthy, survive written in Gaulish, the Celtic language of Gaul. One important source of linguistic data is numismatic with many of the coins having the names of rulers or tribes on them though sometimes abbreviated, and often badly worn and difficult to decipher. Even so, this new hoard, particularly in view of its size, promises to add more names to the dossier.

We look forward to discovering what new evidence the hoard reveals about Gaulish history, language and culture.

Anglo-Saxon Coinage c. 600 - 1066

It never rains but it pours ... with good news.

Congratulations to Dr Rory Naismith, who has just been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to work on Anglo-Saxon coinage in the period c. 600 - 1066. Rory outlines his research project here:

This project is aimed at the preparation of a new volume in the series Medieval European Coinage, published by Cambridge University Press and inaugurated – with support from the Leverhulme Trust - in the early 1980s by Professor Philip Grierson (1910–2006) and his first research assistant Mark Blackburn (1953–2011). Volumes so far published have dealt with early medieval Europe as a whole, along with parts of Spain and Italy. My own volume will be focused on England in the period c. 600–1066. It will contain a fully illustrated catalogue of some 2,500 coins in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a new commentary and introduction. The gold and silver coins of these centuries illustrate the slow metamorphosis from sub-Roman gold shillings, made when Christianity was freshly arrived in England, to the famously sophisticated late Anglo-Saxon coinage, one of the most impressive monetary systems in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. They show the development of kingship, Christian culture and a dynamic economy, often more vividly than any other source. The coins therefore constitute a resource of critical importance to many branches of scholarship, including archaeology and history as well as numismatics. My goal is to provide a fresh and authoritative survey of the full range of Anglo-Saxon coinage, embracing new research and innovative approaches, as well as the impact of numerous new metal-detected finds. It will be the first survey of the whole period to be published in several decades, and the first in more than a century accompanied by such a broad and representative collection.

Letter to Demetrias (British Academy Post-docs Part II)

Following on from our news of Dr Paul Gazzoli's British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship to work on the Life of Anskar, we also wish to congratulate another ASNC, Dr Alison Bonner, who has also been awarded a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship. Ali will be departing for Oxford University, where she will be working on Pelagius' Letter to Demetrias, and she outlines her project here:

My research project is to create a critical edition of a work by the first known British author, Pelagius, famous for his defence of human free will; in his Letter to Demetrias he made a comprehensive case for human free will. Pelagius was excommunicated in 418 AD because of his statements that human nature was inherently good and that human free will was a necessary component in God’s justice. Pelagius’ Letter to Demetrias occupies a special position in his surviving canon because it can be securely attributed to him, and also because it presents a summation of his thought written at a crucial time in his career, when he was aware that he was under attack for maintaining that the principle of free will was integral to the Christian message of salvation. No critical edition, based on a wide comparison of manuscript copies, has ever been made of this Latin text; scholars have had to use a text that was created from just a few manuscripts, has no critical apparatus, and thus has no real authority. As a result scholars have been unable to draw from the letter definitive conclusions about Pelagius’ thought or style. The large number of surviving copies testifies to the influence of Letter to Demetrias throughout the Middle Ages. A critical edition will present the data on the number of surviving witnesses to this text. I will also seek to ascertain whether or not Pelagius was read more widely in Britain than elsewhere in Europe.

Dafydd Jenkins (1911–2012), scholar of medieval Welsh law (inter plurima)

Dr Paul Russell writes:

Professor Dafydd Jenkins, legal historian and the doyen of medieval Welsh law, died in the early hours of Sunday 6 May at the age of 101. Born on 1 March 1911, he lived long enough to have had at least four careers. He was born in London to Cardiganshire parents, attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences followed by Law, and was called to the Bar in 1934. He then worked as a barrister in Carmarthen and in 1938 was secretary of the campaign to have the Welsh language recognised in Court. A conscientious objector during the war, he bought a farm at Trawsnant in Ceredigion and farmed that in the forties and fifties, a farm he still owned at his death. He was influential in Welsh agricultural circles and was instrumental in establishing farming co-operatives in Wales. In the forties and fifties he conducted evening classes on agricultural topics for the Extra-Mural Department of the University of Wales College, Aberystwyth, and from 1965 lectured in the Law Department at Aberystwyth, eventually holding a chair in Legal History and Welsh Law, (1975–1978), until his retirement. 

            All his work on medieval Welsh law was carried out in these latter years, and it is extraordinary to think that when I got to know him in that context he was already retired and in his early seventies. He published widely throughout his life having learnt the art of printing when co-editing Heddiw with Aneirin Talfan Davies while still in London, and he retained to the end a fine sense of page-layout and typography. One of his most famous early works was Tân yn Llŷn (Aberystwyth, 1937), a forensic account of the trial of D. J. Williams, Lewis Valentine, a Saunders Lewis for the burning of the bombing-school in 1937. His other publications included the travel books, Ar Wib yn Nenmarc (Aberystwyth, 1951) and Ar Wib yn Sweden (Aberystwyth, 1959), Y nofel: datblygiad y nofel Gymraeg ar ôl Daniel Owen (Cardiff, 1948), Law for Co-operatives (Oxford, 1958) and an edition of Gwilym Hiraethog's Helyntion Bywyd Hen Deiliwr (Aberystwyth, 1940). The long stream of publications on medieval Welsh law only began in the seventies but continued until 2010; they include Cyfraith Hywel (Llandysul, 1970), Celtic Law Papers (Brussels, 1973), The Law of Hywel Dda: law texts from Medieval Wales (Llandysul, 1986), and editions of Llyfr Colan (Cardiff, 1963) and Damweiniau Colan (Aberystwyth, 1973), and a Conspectus of the Manuscripts of the Cyfnerth Redaction (Cambridge, 2010). In addition he contributed numerous essays to other volumes, including The Welsh King and his Court (Cardiff, 2000), and Tair Colofn Cyfraith: The Three Columns of Law in Medieval Wales (Bangor, 2007). All scholars bring to their work the accumulated experience of their lives, but Dafydd’s life experiences were so rich, varied and relevant that they shine through in everything he wrote. His work was characterized by a detailed and intimate understanding of law, by a marvelous control of Welsh, and in particular by a deep understanding of the law of the land derived from his years of farming it. In 1986, at the age of 75, he was honoured with a Festschrift, Lawyers and Laymen (Cardiff, 1986), and few would have believed he still had so many productive years ahead of him. I worked with him as an editor on some of these volumes and even at the age of 99 he would not let you get away with anything; an absolute stickler for the precise legal terminology, all proofs came back annotated in pencil in a tiny italic hand which, however small, was perfectly legible and ruthlessly clear in its intent.

            One of his great achievements was the establishment of Seminar Cyfraith Hywel which meets twice a year to discuss matters of Welsh law and over the years has been a remarkably productive source of volumes of essays and edited texts on various aspects of medieval Welsh law, such as the laws of women, suretyship, the laws of court, the Three Columns (on homicide, arson and theft), and another one is in the making on the Law of Wild and Tame. He continued to attend the meetings until recently, and on 6 March 2011 we held a special meeting to celebrate his 100^th birthday on the previous St David’s Day. He was unable to attend the last few meetings of the seminar, and there was, and will continue to be, a Dafydd-shaped gap in the front row.

            He is buried next to his wife at Capel Penrhiw, Joppa, next door to his farm at Trawsnant.

The Life of Anskar (British Academy Post-docs Part I)

We are delighted that two members of the Department have recently been awarded British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowships, a particular achievement given the stiff competition for awards this year. In this first post, Dr Paul Gazzoli outlines his proposed research project:

Rimbert's Life of Anskar is our most important document of life in Viking-Age Scandinavia. Unlike most of our written evidence for the period, which was either written centuries later or by people who had never been to Scandinavia, both the subject and the author of the life had spent time in Denmark and Sweden as missionaries. It is also unusual as a piece of hagiography as it devotes a good deal of space to describing the workings of pagan societies without recourse to the normal stereotypes. Despite this, the Life of Anskar has not received the attention it merits, a situation not helped by an old and inaccurate English translation and an edition of the Latin text that does not give enough attention to the different versions of the Life. A falsified version was produced around 1100 at Bremen for political reasons, and it was this version that was known in Germany and Scandinavia for the rest of the middle ages. The chief aim of my research will be to produce a new edition with a full translation and commentary encompassing not only the original Life but also its later development. This new edition will give more attention than the previous one (published in 1884) to the version of the Life produced around 1100. The edition will be accompanied by a new edition of the anonymous Life of Rimbert (again last edited in 1884 and never translated into English).

Sin and Filth

Dr Debby Banham writes:

Congratulations to ASNC alumna Martha Bayless on the publication of her book, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine. This book represents the culmination of a major research project into concepts of bodily corruption in the middle ages, which has taken Prof. Bayless into some of the most obscure recesses of medieval culture. Among many anecdotes collected in the course of the project, probably the incident most dear to ASNC hearts will be the man possessed by the Devil, who farted at the relics of Aldhelm. Why else would anyone do that? In fact, this is an instance of a fairly common motif of people farting at the relics of saints, and needless to say, it did them no good. To find out more, buy the book!

The relevance of the book's subtitle is brought home by an incident in Ekkehard of St Gall's Casus Sancti Galli. Ekkehart relates how Ruodman, the abbot of the nearby monastery of Reichenau (972-986), attempted to catch the monks of St. Gall in the commission of sin by sneaking in the monastery late at night and hiding in the latrines. One of the monks heard him and woke others, and they processed to the latrine and scornfully offered him a lantern and a twist of straw - the two items necessary for legitimate use of the latrine. Anecdotes like these are set in the context of medieval thinking about dirt, contamination and decay, both physical and spiritual.

Here is what the publishers say about the book:

This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real- life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.

Congratulations!

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.

Another ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship!

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.

ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship

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.

Life after ASNC

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.

The Best Statue in Cambridge

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

ASNaC: a USP

Velda Elliott writes:

If there’s one thing that Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice have taught us, it’s the need for a USP: a Unique Selling Point. Once you’ve been an ASNaC, that’s never a problem again!
After graduating, I trained to be a secondary English teacher (which I chose over History because the pay was better – either would have been an option); not an eyebrow has ever been raised that I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic rather than English Literature, from the day I interviewed for the PGCE to my most recent promotion. In fact, in many ways it made me a better prospect for schools, because I had studied linguistics as part of my degree, and too few English teachers know the first thing about teaching English Language, a subject which is increasing in popularity all the time. It made me stand out from the crowds too – the interviewer might not be able to remember the whole name of the course, but they’ll remember you were the person who studied the interesting subject. It’s not just in teaching that this is an advantage – careers for arts students tend not to be subject specific, and being the person who read something out of the ordinary gives you a little extra shine.

People are fascinated by the fact that I studied ASNaC; it’s a conversation starter, often when they approach me, having heard about it from someone else. Esoteric and at the same time immensely interesting, it’s the subject that everyone knows a little about, but never enough. They’re always ready to talk about it, find out what it was, why you chose it. It’s a subject that never fails to impress, and raise a smile.