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Meet a Viking, artist and philosopher!

31/1/2015

Maggie Kneen - or, as the Vikings would have known her, Margaret of the Clan of the Wolf - talks to me about her medieval artwork and her DNA.

Now, beloved, calm yourselves. This week's monastic missive is nothing to do with those horrid heathens who gave Alfred the Great and Ethelred the Unready so much grief.

And, really! I know that you’re aware of my rather delicate, monkish constitution, but you simply must resist the notion that I’m going to run from this Viking squealing like a piglet.

No, beloved. I want you to follow my example of godly forbearance and forgiveness and welcome my Viking guest.

OK, this one isn’t your average, brutal, axe-wielding slayer of monks. No, indeed. In fact, Maggie Kneen is, it would appear, a very friendly Viking.

What’s more, she’s a brilliant artist, having both written and illustrated children’s literature and, more recently, turned her rather gifted hand to medieval architectural drawings. Now what could be less Viking than that?

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Ker-ching! Early medieval compensation claims.

22/1/2015

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Libra, symbol of justice. British Library, Arundel 60 (Winchester, after 1073), folio 6r. This image is PUBLIC DOMAIN. Please click on the image to access source.

It's England, circa 600, in the kingdom of Kent, and your neighbour has attacked your household, and you need revenge! But hang on a minute ... Put aside your unchristian manners and try something new, for it's time to seek compensation!

This past week I’ve been translating a set of laws from the year 600, the kind of thing the Anglo-Saxon Monk must do for his penance. Mind you, Æthelberht’s Code, as these laws are now known, has certainly thrown up some interesting stuff.

You see, King Æthelberht I of Kent – let’s call him Bert, for short – ruled over his south-eastern region of England at a time when the peoples of that land had barely cut their Christian teeth. In fact, it was only in 597, about three years before Bert had his lawcode written, that the Roman missionary Augustine arrived, with his commission from Pope Gregory the Great to convert the heathen English folk. And, low and behold, Bert was pretty much the first of them to convert.

Augustine probably didn’t have to try too hard, mind you, as Bert’s wife Queen Bertha (born c. 539) was already a Christian, in fact had only agreed to marry Bert if he allowed her to continue to practice her religion on arriving from her homeland in Francia.

So it would seem that she had some influence over Bert, and who’s to know how far her preaching and ideas of Christian forgiveness affected his handling of his subjects. And let me tell you, beloved readers, if the contents of his law are anything to go by, Bert’s people most definitely needed reigning in.

The way I see it is that this newly baptized king was trying his damndest to get his people to give up the idea of feuding as the only way to settle their differences. And I’m sure you can guess what England was like at the start of the seventh century. The old Germanic ways were still well and truly ingrained. You know: tit for tat, you kill my relative, and I’ll kill yours, a never ending cycle of bloody vengeance, that sort of thing. (Just read Beowulf to get the gist.)

What Bert did, however, was introduce the idea of financial compensation as recompense for acts of violence against the person: a way of terminating a feuding quarrel, and thus of preventing the typical testeronic escalations of death and destruction.

And you know what, if you played your hand well, you could make quite a few shillings and sceattas from your attacker.

So let’s imagine you’re a free man who’s been in a bit of a quarrel with a neighbour, and you’ve humiliated him in some way – maybe you’ve told him he smells like a pig, and that his wife is a pig – and so he seeks revenge. Consequently, he breaks into your house, knocks your screaming wife over the head, binds you up, kills your domestic servant who tries to come to your aid, nicks a few of your nice things, and then proceeds to bash you about a bit, sword in hand.

But there’s no need to get mad – or even. Once he’s gone, wake your wife and get her to untie you, and then run to the head men of your village in order to let them know what’s transpired. They’ll grab your nasty neighbour, before he flees and becomes an outlaw, give him some sort of trial, and then all you need to do is simply stand back, get your counting stones out, and watch all those sceattas and shillings mount up!

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Did Merlin have a grammar problem?

15/1/2015

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The Anglo-Saxon Monk meets a Master of Merlin, Ivana Radman, who lets us into a few secrets about Colin Morgan's dragon speak ...

Young Merlin, Uther and a fire-breathing dragon. British Library, Egerton 3028 (England, 14th century), folio 33r. This is a PUBLIC DOMAIN image. Please click on image to go to the source.

It's not every day you meet a Master of Merlin, by which I mean someone who wrote her Masters thesis on the subject, 'Old English Spells in BBC's Merlin'. I know it's not very Anglo-Saxon of me, but I'm going to say it all the same: How cool is that!

Ivana is from Croatia, and she completed her Masters degree at the University of Zagreb in 2014.

She left me a comment on my previous post about the language in Merlin. When she told me what she'd been researching, well I just had to know more.

So, my beloved readers, let's find out what she has to say about Colin Morgan's spells and his Old English inflections ... oh, and something called a bromance? Is that Anglo-Norman?

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Meet a Viking, artist and philosopher!

Maggie Kneen ﻿﻿- or, as the Vikings would have known her, Margaret of the Clan of the Wolf - talks to me about her medieval artwork and her DNA.

Ker-ching! Early medieval compensation claims.

It's England, circa 600, in the kingdom of Kent, and your neighbour has attacked your household, and you need revenge! But hang on a minute ... Put aside your unchristian manners and try something new, for it's time to seek compensation!

Did Merlin have a grammar problem?

The Anglo-Saxon Monk meets a Master of Merlin, Ivana Radman, who lets us into a few secrets about Colin Morgan's dragon speak ...

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Maggie Kneen - or, as the Vikings would have known her, Margaret of the Clan of the Wolf - talks to me about her medieval artwork and her DNA.