Tom Shippey

The legend of King Arthur must be the most enduring legacy of the Middle Ages. Everyone knows it: children, scholars, readers of comic books, movie-makers. The scenes and motifs associated with it – Excalibur, the Round Table, the adultery of Guinevere, the return to Avalon – are more familiar than anything linked to real medieval kings. Many people, furthermore, believe in King...

Norse myths are probably more familiar than classical ones in the modern world, perhaps even more familiar than the Old Testament stories Europeans were once brought up on. That is remarkable when one considers the almost vanished literature on which our knowledge of the myths is based. We would know virtually nothing of the tradition of Eddic poetry, with its stories of Thor and Odin and...

Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools is something of a capstone on a long scholarly career devoted to the history of education, running from his English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973) to Medieval Children (2001), and taking in thirty other studies listed in the bibliography, most of them the product of detailed archival research. It is accordingly rather a cheek for a reviewer to take...

The Anglo-Saxons had no libraries in the sense that we understand the word: rooms, or better still buildings, dedicated to the storage of books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with the title arca libraria, but what that means is, clearly, ‘book-box’. Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept...

‘Viking Age Iceland’ makes as much sense as ‘Victorian America’. The Viking Age began, as far as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was concerned, in 789, when the port-reeve of Dorchester saw three strange ships in Portland harbour and rode down to collect harbour-dues, as he had presumably done many times before. But on this occasion he discovered, fatally for himself, that...