Merlin, Myrddin Wyllt, & the ‘Men of the North’

Tim Clarkson, Scotland's Merlin: A Medieval Legend and Its Dark Age Origins, John Donald, 2016. Amazon US $22 PB, $8 Kindle. Tim Clarkson's new book, Scotland's Merlin, was a lovely break from my usual plague reading. Merlin is one of the few Arthurian characters who can stand alone from the Arthurian corpus as the Welsh figure...

Emperor Justinian and the British Kings, c. 540

Roman historian Procopius had a lot to complain about in his Secret History. Its pretty easy to say that he did a hatchet job on his bosses, Emperor Justinian and General Belisauris. Procopius was the Late Antique equivalent of a severely conservative 'think tank' founder, you know the type that queue up to appear on talk...

Filling the Gaps: Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons

Tim and I have been chatting about Strathclyde for longer than either of us would probably care to admit (even before his name was on the cover of any books!). So I was thrilled to tuck in with his latest book Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age in the days running up to Christmas....

Heavenfield Round-up 7: June Links

I'm not sure where June went. I wish I had been more productive, but luckily some of my fellow bloggers have been  much busier. Bamburgh Research Project has been out in the field for most of June. Various updates have been posted on their blog. Curt Emanuel, the Medieval History Geek, has posts on late...

Books on Early Medieval Britons

Sally Wilde mentioned on her blog this week that it is hard to find information on early medieval Wales. There is no doubt that this is true. It would help to search for Britons rather than Welsh, since Wales didn't come into existence until after the early medieval period. So I went through the bibliography...

All Cadwaladr’s Mothers

[From the archives with a new title: a little bit of folklore for the first Friday in June.] Cadwaladr the blessed is one of my favorite Old British folklore figures so I can't leave 2007 behind without one long post on him. A paraphrase translation follows of some matrilinear notes on Cadwaladr in the Bonedd...