Sublime

Within a year of the battle at Chester, whether or not Æðelfrið’s campaign had been directed at Edwin or at those who would shelter him, the exiled prince left, or was encouraged to leave, the protection of his British sponsors and seek sanctuary with a king whom he must have believed lay beyond Æðelfrið’s reach. Rædwald, he of the Sutton Hoo ship

In a different context again, in 1962 an innovative coffer-dam excavation revealed five ships that had been deliberately scuttled in the eleventh century to form part of a sunken blockade controlling access to the Roskilde fjord in Denmark. They proved to be of types that had not been seen before in the archaeology, but which expanded the typology

The Secret History of the Mongols,

In a culture reliant on oral traditions for preserving and mediating history, it would not be surprising if, two hundred years later, the trauma was still clearly embedded in stories—a terrifying vision of endings and beginnings that were also part of a longer cycle. After all, the preordination of fate, the inevitability of the Ragnarök, and the g

The Scandinavians of the eighth to eleventh centuries knew the word—víkingr in Old Norse when applied to a person—but they would not have recognised themselves or their times by that name. For them it would perhaps have meant something approximating to ‘pirate’, defining an occupation or an activity (and probably a relatively marginal one); it was

See Higham 1995, 74ff for the argument that King Edwin of Northumbria had the list drawn up in about 627 by Bishop Paulinus in the aftermath of his war against Wessex. The perceived crime was an assassination attempt on Edwin by a Wessex ambassador in 626, vividly described by Bede in HE II.9.

Early Medieval kings were required to fight, to defend and expand their territories, and to display their successes appropriately. The Beowulf poem provides the model. As Hrothgar, king of the Danes, prospers, so the size of his warband increases: Then to Hrothgar was granted glory in battle, Mastery of the field; so friends and kinsmen gladly obey