I’ve found some very useful OE dictionaries online, but I’ve been less successful with Old Irish and have absolutely come up empty for Cumbric and other Brythonic languages. If anyone can point me to some resources, I’d be most grateful. Meanwhile, I did find a short but amusing Alternative Breton Dictionary. I can now say […]
Read more "dictionaries"Three days ago I wrote a scene where my protagonist, Hild (now aged ten), stands on the Whitby headland for the first time, by the ruins of an old Roman signal tower and a broken down old church complete with a thorn hedge and graveyard. Here she meets a young cowherd who informs her that […]
Read more "Coincidence"Why ‘Gemæcca’? I subscribe to British Archaeology, a bi-monthly magazine stuffed with dug-up-in-Britain wonders, covering everything from how to excavate an abandoned Ford Transit Van to discovery of tools created half a million years ago. The thrill factor is variable (I often read it in bed and nod out over the articles). But a few […]
Read more "Why ‘Gemæcca’?"This is the novel that I’ve been aiming for my whole life. I didn’t really understand that until early last year when I wrote my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life (a multi-media memoir-in-a-box about my life in the UK before I came to […]
Read more "Where It Began"I’m having a little trouble sorting out some word choices. Specifically, I need to decide whether a certain character would be a gesith, a thegn, or something else (ealdorman?). A gesith, as I understand it, is a warrior companion, a member of the warband. It’s a term used in very early A-S times, i.e. the […]
Read more "Word Choice"I’m writing a novel about Hild of Whitby, also known as St. Hilda, who lived in seventh century Britain. For about ten years I’ve been researching, on and off, the basics: language, the politics of conversion, food, arms and armour, textile production, etc. The more I learn the more I realise I don’t know. So […]
Read more "History Meme Game"
Gemæcce 