My translation of Völuspá in Reliquiae

This month my translation of extracts of the Old Norse mythological poem Völuspá was published in the tenth anniversary issue of the journal Reliquiae. You can order a copy here and you can read some short extracts here. Corbel Stone Press produce some wonderful volumes on nature and myth, and I can't think of a …

My translation of The Wanderer published in the journal Ancient Exchanges

Just a very short post to say that my translation of the Old English lyric The Wanderer has been published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Ancient Exchanges. I'm very proud to have my first translation published in a proper journal and I hope it will be the start of a new stage of my …

Old English Wisdom: The Exeter Book Maxims

One of the more unusual genres of poetry you encounter when studying Old English (and Old Norse) is so-called wisdom poetry. Carolyne Larrington characterises a wisdom poem as one ‘which exists primarily to impart a body of information about the condition of the world’, usually paired with advice, and notes that it is among one …

The Wanderer: an Old English lyric poem

Note: this translation has now been published in the Autumn 2021 issue of the journal Ancient Exchanges, which you can find at this link. As a result, I have removed the translation from here, but I wanted to preserve my original introduction below. When I arrived at Leeds to study English way back in 2008, …

When translation goes wrong: the Finnesburg Fragment

My translations are ok. Competent but not, y'know, sensational. I aim to have them be akin to the sort of thing an undergraduate might read: relatively 'faithful' to what the text says, roughly approximating some stylistic aspects of the originals, and perhaps even occasionally offering something aesthetically pleasing. For me, translation was an obvious, if …

Poetry and Conversion in the Viking Age, Part 2: Hallfreðr ‘troublesome poet’ at the court of King Olaf Tryggvason

In the first part of this post I explored Hallfreðr's Conversion Verses, providing a translation of them as a coherent whole. We don't, however, have a contemporary tenth- or eleventh-century account of Hallfreðr's performance of this poetry, and indeed it is only in the later Middle Ages that we have any record of the poet …

Poetry and Conversion in the Viking Age, Part 1: Hallfreðr ‘troublesome-poet’ Óttarsson’s Conversion Verses

Hallfreðr Óttarsson, known as vandræðaskáld ('troublesome-poet'), was an Icelandic court poet at the turn of the eleventh century who spent much of his time in Norway. Court poets in the Viking Age were known as skalds (Old Norse skáld) and seem to have been highly mobile figures, plying their trade across the North Sea region …

Set yet speaking: Welcome to my website + Beowulf lines 1687-98a

Hello everyone. If you've come here via my Twitter account - and let's face it, you definitely have - then you will know that I like to post translations of Old English and Old Norse texts. I enjoy translating poetry in particular, despite (or maybe because of) the anxiety in balancing "fidelty" and creativity, of …