I’ve finally become wholly exasperated by the blank verse translations of my elderly edition of OE poetry. Can anyone recommend a really good collection? Bilingual would be best. I need all the usual suspects–Widsith, The Ruins, Wanderer, Fight at Finnsburgh etc., plus a few riddles–and the more I come to understand of OE, the more […]
Read more "Seeking OE reader recommendations"I need to decide what to call a fortified camp south of Carlisle, that is, what the people of Rheged in the early 7th C might have called it. It’s known these days as Brougham; the Romans called it Brocavum (it was the base of Danubian numerii) but now we’re a few centuries on. I […]
Read more "place names/etymology"I spent a while yesterday morning sitting on a bench overlooking Puget Sound and was struck by how, although the water looked the same as it must have looked for thousands of years, the sky was very different. It was full of contrails–not just the sword-like slash of a just-cut trail, but also the gauzy […]
Read more "Imagery"After a careful reading of Richard Coates’ Invisible Britons (thanks, Marisa) I was pondering upon slavery, language, and cultural annihilation and, frankly, getting nowhere at the speed of light. And then in the Economist this week, I encountered an article about the evolution of language that ended (in typical Economist style): “As Noah Webster, the […]
Read more "Slavery, language, cultural annihilation"Today I started flipping through Barbara Yorke’s Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England and I came across her discussion of the Tribal Hidage which, she asserts, was most likely put together for use by Mercia as a guide to expected tribute payments. The thing is, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would a […]
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Gemæcce 