A friend just sent me this link to a Discovery News article on the recent excavation of a royal Anglo-Saxon grave. I’d read about it a few months elsewhere (thanks to links provided by a variety of blogs, for example Carla Naylund Historical Fiction) and this article wouldn’t rate a mention but for its truly […]
Read more "I am appalled"Time to confess: I’ve been taking unconscionable liberties with a well-known historical character. I took a very brief and most definitely dubious mention of a possible siege of Bebbanburg by Fiachnae mac Báetáin of the Dál nAraidi, turned it into reality (well, fiction). But that’s not the worst of it: then I had one of […]
Read more "Most Heinous Use of an Historical Character (So Far…)"I now have 37,000 words. Hild is ten. She has just deliberately assumed the uncomfortable mantle of lightbringer, per her mother’s prophetic dream. She knows she has no otherwordly gifts, but she knows this is the only way to persuade the king to do certain things she–being a very bright and observant child–believes to be […]
Read more "General Update"According to Bede, Edwin was preceded by a standard bearer, carrying a ‘tufa’. My assumption has always been that this was a Roman-style standard, or perhaps a staff. At some point I’ll need to work out what that looked like. But another assumption I’m making is that he didn’t assume such pretensions until the late […]
Read more "Edwin’s banner, Edwin’s family name"I’ve got myself into a bit of a muddle, a plot hole involving time and geography: I need to get a warband from Galloway to Bebbanburg lickety-split. If they were only a few people, I’d put them on a boat to Solway Firth, then send them galloping along the Roman road to Arbeia-that-was, then taking […]
Read more "Arbeia/Tinamutha (?)"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 […]
Read more "Tribal Hidage"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"
Gemæcce 