While early medieval riddles in Old English and, to a lesser extent, Latin, have been studied extensively from ecocritical perspectives in recent years, the large corpora of riddles in other languages of western Eurasia have yet to benefit from or feed back into these methodological developments. Meanwhile, ecocritical research generally has…[Read more]

It has been thought that of the forty or so surviving Old Norse riddles, only two have close parallels in the wider international riddle tradition. This note shows, however, that the riddle on the leek in the probably thirteenth-century Heiðreks saga has a close parallel in one of the late antique or early medieval Bern Riddles, on garlic.…[Read more]

Agnete Lothʼs edition of the longer version of Jarlmanns saga og Hermanns included an accompanying English paraphrase (by Gillian Fellows Jensen), but there has never been a full translation into English, much less of the shorter version as edited by Hugo Rydberg. We rectify that omission here, providing a normalized text of Rydbergʼs edition w…[Read more]

This book analyses novels in Icelandic that responded to the 2008 Crash. It affords a major case-study of how writers globally responded to the Financial Crisis, and one of the only monographs on contemporary Icelandic literature, providing a window for Anglophone readers into Iceland’s current literary scene. Chapter 1 sketches the history of the…[Read more]

Despite its fame as the pre-eminent medieval Icelandic saga, Njáls saga lacks a stemma comprehending all the saga’s manuscripts: only the vellum manuscripts have been surveyed in detail. As part of the Variance of Njáls saga (Breytileki Njáls sögu) project, we produced a stemma of nearly all witnesses to chapters 44, 86, and 142. This affor…[Read more]

‘ “You Tempt me Grievously to a Mythological Essay”: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Correspondence with Arthur Ransome’, edits a letter from Tolkien to Ransome held in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds. On December 13th 1937, the celebrated children’s author Arthur Ransome wrote to J. R. R. Tolkien with a few comments on Tolkien’s newly publi…[Read more]

‘The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy’ makes its contributions in three main areas, pragmatic, theoretical and historical:

* Pragmatic: this is an ‘open source’ paper. Its findings arise from several datasets which are published online, primarily at htt…[Read more]

‘A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period’ argues that Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica contains unnoticed evidence for the processes of transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon toponymy in early Anglo-Saxon England. B…[Read more]

This article seeks better to understand the processes whereby English and, to a lesser extent, Gaelic, expanded in early medieval Britain at the expense of the p-Celtic dialects. Most research has tried to examine this process in its earliest, prehistoric phases, but the present study focuses on the (near-)contemporary evidence for its seventh-…[Read more]

‘On the Etymology of Adel’ is a light-hearted tour of the historiography of the etymology of Adel, a parish in North Leeds, resisting the twentieth-century concensus of Old English adela (‘filth, dirt, dirty place; foul filth; bilge-water’ and possibly even ‘sewer, privy’) in favour of *Eada-lēah (‘Eada’s lea’), suggested in 1910 by F. W. Moorman.

‘The Orality of a Silent Age: The Place of Orality in Medieval Studies’ uses a brief survey of current work on Old English poetry as the point of departure for arguing that although useful, the concepts of orality and literacy have, in medieval studies, been extended further beyond their literal referents of spoken and written communication than…[Read more]

‘Constructing Anglo-Saxon Sanctity: Tradition, Innovation and Saint Guthlac’ develops the unique opportunities afforded by the hagiography surrounding the Anglo-Saxon saint Guthlac for investigating the place of saints’ cults in Anglo-Saxon society. Guthlac was one of England’s first home-grown saints, and enjoyed a commensurate prominence in…[Read more]

‘Glosses, Gaps and Gender: The Rise of Female Elves in Anglo-Saxon Culture’ addresses the fact that it is difficult to detect lexical change within Old English, since most of our texts derive from a relatively short period, but lexical change can afford valuable insights into cultural change. The paper identifies changes in the semantics of the…[Read more]

‘Turning your Coursework into Articles’ discusses how undergraduate and master’s-level coursework can be developed into academic articles. The piece begins by addressing some practical questions about publishing coursework–about whether and where students should try to publish. It then focuses on the writing itself–at how writer-centred…[Read more]

‘Translating the Medieval Icelandic Romance-Sagas’ is a short note surveying recent work done on translating romances composed in medieval Iceland into English, focusing on translations produced at the University of Leeds. It describes the ongoing project of the author and his collaborators to produce further translations for free-access publication.

‘Fornaldarsögur and Financial Crisis: Bjarni Bjarnason’s Mannorð’ is a relatively rare example of research on the modern reception of the medieval Icelandic genre of the fornaldarsögur. This article examines Bjarni Bjarnason’s 2011 novel Mannorð, which draws heavily on Gautreks saga. Bjarni’s work is shown to belong to a trend in Icelandic novel…[Read more]

‘How did the world come into being?’, is a fleeting, light-hearted report of Leeds students collecting accounts of how the world came into being.