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 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 ...

Gaze around Britain’s great cathedrals and castles, at the carved stone and painted glass – the biblia idiotarum or “books of the unlettered” – and they eloquently evoke every age back to William the ...

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 ...

As an invitation to explore the wonders of Old English, hand-saex is certainly arresting. The Dictionary of Old English, based at the University of Toronto (doe.utoronto.ca), offered hand-saex as last ...

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 ...

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes who gradually invaded England starting in the 5th century in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Originally, they came from what is now the ...