Thijs Porck

What if Wealhtheow, the gracious queen in Beowulf, wasn't just handing out mead cups to guests and giving politically savy speeches? What if she was harbouring vengeful feelings and set in motion a secret murder plot? In a recently published article, I ha

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) is an anime film that tells the story of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, and his daughter Héra. The movie is based on the Appendices of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and contains many refere

This blog post introduces four new knowledge clips about an interesting topic: cultural contacts between 'the East' and 'the West' in the Early Middle Ages! How much contact was there between early medieval England and the Middle East? Fatima al Moufridji

A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: a number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. This discovery is a possible key to a European mystery: pieces of the same manuscri

One of the most important liturgical books in early medieval England was the Psalter. Some thirty Anglo-Saxon manuscripts containing the complete Psalter have survived, including no fewer than fifteen with (partial or complete) Old English interlinear glo

This blog post introduces a new online tool to explore the vocabulary of the Old English poem Beowulf. The tool is freely available and can offer unique new insights into the vocabulary of early medieval England's best-known epic. When a poet unlocks his

In the 9th century, an anonymous scribe copied a poem attributed to the Irish missionary Columbanus (540-615) and made a crucial mistake. He accidentally omitted one line from the poem. Since this 9th-century manuscript is the only extant copy of the 120-

From the Viking mead drinking in Valhalla to the unending punishments of the Greek underworld, the afterlife has always been an imaginative place. In this blog post, I survey how the afterlife was conceptualised in early medieval England, in particular wi

"Men þa leofestan!" "Men ða leofestan!" "Men þa leofestan!" This blog post deals with the ways in which a very common Old English phrase was differentiated by early medieval English scribes. Men þa leofestan! An opening formula of many Old English homilie

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a fascinating collection of Old English annals that survives in multiple manuscripts and manuscript fragments. This blog post demonstrates that the manuscripts show a fascinating variety even in those annals for which there wa