Ship Burial Novel

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 passing generation wear unscrewed the lid of a modest burial urn and then upended the [...]

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 than sexual ends. It seems to me that in the attempt to ‘clear her name’ and reassert her rightful role among the ‘Followers of [...]

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 should now be in lowland Scotland is testament to the argy-bargy that has been an almost continuous feature [...]

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 shall tell of it. It seemed I saw a tree lifted high, wrapped round with light, bright ray of [...]

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 remember the 1980s and one of the best bands of that decade Talk Talk might be reminded of the classic track April 5th [...]

‘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 adrift on the great lake. Some things never change. Väinämöinen himself is sometimes a kind of water-god, [...]

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 interesting helmet of Swedish design. The craftsmanship of the clothing and war-gear was breathtaking. The pen is mightier than the [...]

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 request to open his trunk the customs official discovered that it contained nothing except for a single football boot and a battered copy of Moby [...]

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 the year 620 can be seen sitting on the King’s lordly head, here. Search ‘Sutton Hoo’ on [...]

Älvalek by August Malmström 1866 © National Museum, Stockholm This beautiful painting, which I would love to see in the flesh one day, is as you can see by glancing to your right, the cover picture for The Rune of Ing. Älvalek means ‘Dancing Elves’ or ‘Dancing Fairies’ but I prefer the former, not only from [...]