Making sense of Cadwallon (or, An excuse to play with maps)

In which I talk about Cadwallon, his origins, faults, and battles—as one giant excuse to play with maps

MENEWOOD!!

The first draft of MENEWOOD is finished!!

CFP: A Hild Companion

This is a call for contributors, and ideas, to a companion volume to Hild: an accessible guide to the book and its Early Medieval context.

Hild’s feast day

Today is the anniversary of Hild’s death in 680. I mark it because Hild—and Whitby, and ammonites—have marked my life.

IONA Vancouver

Last week I spent five days at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, to attend IONA: Early medieval studies on the islands of the North Atlantic—transformative networks, skills, theories, and methods for the future of the field. If you are an early medievalist, you should go the next one at King’s College London, November 2021.

Viking warrior women: reassessing Birka grave

In 2017 Charlotte Hedenstierna‐Jonson, Anna Kjellström, Torun Zachrisson et al wrote “A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics” and kicked off a storm. ow they respond to t heir critics.

Dancing Reindeer

Usually at this time of year I blow up the Christmas tree with FX (one of my favourites so far: a dragon flaming the tree to ash). But 2017 has been a year of too much destruction, so here’s something entirely fun. It makes me grin, anyway.

More thoughts on women warriors

*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 […]

A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics

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.

Doctor Griffith

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.

38% of English ancestry derived from Anglo-Saxon migration

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.

Cait Sith in the Eildon Hills

Two maps of Gododdin territory—where Hild becomes Cait Sith…

Paperback of Hild just out in the UK

Hild is “A magnificent and convincing portrayal of a strange, wild, beautiful world.” — Guardian

Quick addendum to Elfshot-and-beliefs post

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.

Frige hwæt ic hatte

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.

Gemæcce

The story of making the novels about Hild of Whitby