Sublime

great Danish poet, Jens Peter Jacobsen.

Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at sixty-eight, was not only the oldest, but the most senior commander in the Wehrmacht.e Known as the “Black Knight” (Schwarzer Ritter), he had led the invasion of Poland in 1939, the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, and the capture of Kiev in 1941.

Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political lega