Sublime

Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man’s life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls.

As if under the spell of some Old Testament prophet, the turning tide drains Scilly of its turquoise sea and from nowhere, it seems, citizen and tourist alike begin to pick their way, more or less dry-shod, across low sandy causeways to what had recently been a neighbouring island – to visit friends, to take advantage of the free passage or, more l

Like the Irish Sea, the North Sea is a natural basin across and around which vessels plied, sometimes speculatively, throughout the first millennium. Tidal and seasonal currents favoured circular voyages; convenient harbours and river estuaries provided trading, beaching and pilotage opportunities, knowledge of whose advantages and risks were hande

William Adams

No surviving English, Welsh or Scottish document describes such arrangements: the earliest Anglo-Saxon law codes speak of obligations between lords and their followers and dependants, not between kings. Even so, a set of rules can be reconstructed with some confidence through the careers of those who were able to wield imperium over others and by l

The Northumbrian army was resoundingly defeated; Æðelfrið was slain and his imperium died with him on the battlefield. By such strokes of fate Edwin succeeded to the Northumbrian kingdom. In victory, he was obliged to recognize Rædwald’s superiority, offering noble hostages to his court, sending gifts reflective of the honour in which he was held a

Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up paralle