A poem inspired by a reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Battle of Maldon'. This poem was first published in my 'New and Selected Poems' (Peterloo, 2005)
The legend of the founding of Evesham is that while searching for his pigs on the banks of the River Avon, Eof, a swineherd, received a vision of the Virgin Mary. Eof related this vision to Ecgwine (Saint Egwin), Bishop of Worcester. Ecgwine founded…
Sometime in the early 1970s, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges visited his friend the poet (and later Borges' translator) Alistair Reid at St Andrews in Scotland. Various myths and legends have grown up around this visit in the oral tradition…
The Ruthwell Cross is an Anglo-Saxon (or more properly Northumbrian) stone sculpture, dating from the eighth (or perhaps seventh) century, and now housed in Ruthwell parish church in Dumfriesshire, although it may have once stood outside. Runic…
This text is an adaptation from the Old English poem 'The Ruin', which is preserved in the tenth-century Codex known as The Exeter Book. The Old English 'Ruin' describes a fallen and decaying city, and has sometimes been seen as an Anglo-Saxon…