Ship Burial Novel

‘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, [...]

It is a strange coincidence that the ‘coming of the English’ to the south eastern parts of these islands as described by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History should have involved three longships. When Bartholomew Gosnold’s expedition set sail from London in 1607 with the blessing of King James to found a profitable colony in the [...]

When Shakespeare sat down to write Hamlet sometime in the late 1590s it seems to me that he was beset by a number of preoccupations which went far beyond the healthy desire to write a popular play that would keep the crowd happy. It is my favourite of the works I have read and the [...]

I have mug from the Science Museum with the solar system on it. It includes much useful information. The sort of information that one might need at a moment’s notice. Such as the fact that the planet Saturn has a diameter of 74, 564 miles and is 884, 700, 000 miles from the sun. The [...]

The strange and beautiful rings of the planet Saturn were first observed by Galileo when he noted through his telescope a peculiar object that appeared to have ears. They consist of fragmentary lumps of ice of vastly differing size which orbit the planet and are perhaps the atomised debris of a former moon. There is, [...]

We live in curious times. Rightly or wrongly I believe that Anglo-Saxon culture is fundamental to a sense of English identity. Fundamental does not mean to the exclusion of all other influences. Fundamental does not mean genetic. However if a person wishes to believe that they are somehow related to the Venerable Bede I shall [...]

England’s green and pleasant land heavily fortified.  I was prompted to write this post after seeing the ‘Time Team’ special. Good old Tony Robinson. I enjoy his Dan Brown debunking excursions too. As we have all been buried under snow drifts for the past week and Britain seems more like Siberia at the moment it’s [...]

In the rain… Well I might not get many plaudits from the Ipswich tourist board but I promise to snap it in the sunshine some time. This is a sky though all too familiar. The view is looking towards the brand new university building. It’s an impressive bit of kit. After all there was nothing there before [...]

It was with some trepidation that I sat down with a cup of tea and a bourbon to watch Channel 4′s drama 1066: The Battle for Middle Earth. On the one hand I was amazed that something about Anglo-Saxons that didn’t include Tony Robinson and Time Team had managed to get airtime but on the other, the way [...]