The second installment in the Nickname of the Week series we take a look at Onund ‘Treefoot’, a disabled Viking from the Sagas, whose nickname brings with it an ambiguous interpretation. Onund appears in the beginning of Grettir’s Saga, a 14thC Icelandic Saga, as a kind of genealogical backstory. A free version of the saga […]
An Oxford Historian May 16, 2021 7 min read Updated: May 23, 2021 How did rich late ‘Anglo-Saxons’ live? Can their use of buildings and shape tell us about how they viewed themselves, and how they maintained their power? In the final part of the series discussing how Anglo-Saxon thegns expressed their power and status, […]
An Oxford Historian Aug 13, 2021 2 min read The poetry of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ holds an interesting middle-ground in public perception. On the one-hand Beowulf is perhaps the single most famous piece of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural output, of any form. Tolkien famously translated it, as did Heaney, and there was that terrible movie in the 2000s […]
Hello, my name is Tristan and I’m a first-year history PhD researcher at Oxford. The aim of this blog is to share my research and wider history on the early medieval world, help give any advice on applying to university and explaining about Oxford, and generally expanding engagement with the Humanities. So if you fall […]
An Oxford Historian Feb 27, 2021 8 min read Updated: Apr 26, 2021 This week, in a cannibalised version of a piece of coursework I once wrote, I thought it would be interesting to explore the question of post-colonialism (esp. hybridity) in regard to the study of the Vikings – what can this approach tell […]
An Oxford Historian Jun 14, 2021 3 min read Cat Jarman’s new book River Kings is a huge triumph, not only for the study of the Vikings in England more broadly, but for the accessibility of the archaeological method, and the outstanding uses it can be put to. #ComissionsEarned (This post includes Amazon Affiliate links) […]
Hello, my name is Tristan and I’m a first-year history PhD researcher at Oxford. The aim of this blog is to share my research and wider history on the early medieval world, help give any advice on applying to university and explaining about Oxford, and generally expanding engagement with the Humanities. So if you fall […]