*I was going to link to this post from my personal blog but in the end decided to just repost. Here’s an interesting addition to the debate about the Viking warrior grave in Birka I discussed yesterday. The author, Professor Judith Jesch, makes some good points about the overall gaps in the journal authors’ argument and presentation. Go read […]
Read more "More thoughts on women warriors"A recent paper in American Journal of Physical Anthropology shows that a grave in Viking-age Birka, Sweden, furnished with the material goods of a high-ranking warrior, is that of a female.
Read more "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics"For the last year I’ve been lost in a project that’s not Hild-related. And, Lo! That project was successful! I now hold a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University. I am Doctor Griffith.
Read more "Doctor Griffith"An article published 19 January 2016 in Nature Communications, “Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history,” by Stephan Schiffels et al, estimates that the ancestry of the modern-day East English population is about 38% Anglo-Saxon.
Read more "38% of English ancestry derived from Anglo-Saxon migration"Two maps of Gododdin territory—where Hild becomes Cait Sith…
Read more "Cait Sith in the Eildon Hills"Hild is “A magnificent and convincing portrayal of a strange, wild, beautiful world.” — Guardian
Read more "Paperback of Hild just out in the UK"I recently began Karen Jolly’s Popular Religion in Late Anglo-Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context and found myself starting to make some changes to a previous post, Elfshot, medicine, and changing belief systems.
Read more "Quick addendum to Elfshot-and-beliefs post"Are the riddles in the Exeter Book designed to have more than one answer, and, if so, why? To educate or to entertain? Either way, here’s my solution to Riddle 53.
Read more "Frige hwæt ic hatte"Anglo-Saxon medicine is a mix of empirical treatment and sophisticated psychological techniques. The trick with placebo and nocebo—for both the medieval practitioner and the modern—is in understanding what the stricken patient believes. These beliefs change over time.
Read more "Elfshot, medicine, and changing belief systems"Hild is heading north to talk (unofficially, of course) with Coledauc of the Gododdin. I had to draw maps to work out where she might go, and how, and why.
Read more "Gododdin"