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Raedwald, Redwald, Radwald
Well I had to use it eventually didn’t I? I have resisted the urge for over a year; but here is the Sutton Hoo helmet as painstakingly pieced together by archaeology. A replica as it probably looked in...
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Loomings
And God created great whales … Call me Imma. Some years ago when the English writer and leviathan alcoholic Malcolm Lowry arrived in the port of New York, legend has it that upon complying with a...
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Way of the Anglo-Saxon Warrior
King Rædwald was at Sutton Hoo this weekend with a small war-band. In addition to the King himself, it was this scop’s privilege to converse with one of his closest thanes, who was wearing an...
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Sibelius, the Kalevala, and Finland Awakes!
‘Neither do I know how to be, which way to live in this evil age, with time running out.’ So says steady old Väinämöinen one of the strange characters of the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala when cast...
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The Goddess Eostre
Windflower by John William Waterhouse 1903 ‘April is the cruellest month’ says T S Eliot in the opening line of The Wasteland presumably precisely because this month can be so beautiful. Those who...
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Dreaming of the Rood
Hwæt! Ic swefna cyst secgan wylle hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte. syðÞan reordberend reste wunedon. Hark! At midnight the fairest of dreams attended me, when voices were still and all asleep, and I...
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The Ruthwell Cross
The earliest version of The Dream of the Rood that we have is inscribed in runes on an Anglo-Saxon cross that is now to be found in an apse of the church at Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire. The fact that it...
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Mary Magdalene and the Merovingians
Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb (artist unknown, date unknown) She was always everybody’s favourite sinner and now it has become fashionable to appropriate her for political rather...
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The Prittlewell Prince
The only way is Essex: Southend Pier Once upon a time I witnessed a scattering of ashes at the end of Southend Pier. An elderly man dressed in the sort of tweed suit that only elderly men from a now...
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Comet in Moominland
Moomintroll, Snufkin, Snorks and Sniff crossing the dried up sea on stilts as the comet looms large and the end of the world is nigh The Moomins and other peculiar creatures that inhabit the equally...
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