The Vikings invaded England in the 9th and 10th centuries. They plundered, raped and burned towns to the ground. Or at least, this is the story we know from school and popular culture. But the ...

Hwæt. That word, barking through the clatter of the mead hall, typically opened an Old English poem in the Dark Ages, and roughly translates to “What” or “Listen now.” Old English is largely Germanic, ...

The five centuries between the end of Roman rule and the Norman Conquest were, for a long time, seen as a culturally desolate era in British history. Whereas classical civilisation was associated with ...

A new, old specter is haunting the world ... it wasn’t until the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century that scholars started to refer to the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, in a bid to ...

For the first time, researchers have been able to directly estimate the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the British population from ancient skeletons. Human remains excavated from burial sites near Cambridge ...

My thanks for one of your wonderful book reviews. On your pages, I find books that other, more “trendy” reviewers largely ignore. This one, “The Wordhord” by Hana Videen, reviewed by Henry Hitchings ...