Rachel Fletcher

A copy of The Translations of Seamus Heaney on a wooden surface.

New post!

I take an in-depth look at Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, alongside forays into Victorian translations by William Morris and the brilliantly named Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth.

This is based on an undergraduate lecture I gave at Oxford in 2020.

nikolasgunn.co.uk/2026/02/09/o...

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838–1926) is my latest #OEDMaker, and here’s a piece about him. Also available on Facebook to @DictionarySocNA members and at themakersoftheoed.wordpress.com/miscellaneou...

Turns out there's more to Felix Liebermann than just obsessiveness about manuscripts and a fondness for difficult German. ingridfiv.github.io/ingridsblog/...

Vacancies

Merton College, Oxford are advertising a career development fellowship in medieval English—a four-year teaching-and-research post: www.merton.ox.ac.uk/vacancies.

D/l 9 AM, 24 February (think of it as 23 February!).

Early Modernists: I've encountered a symbol in a page signature and don't know how to represent it in a citation. The closest I can find in MS Word is unicode 0260, "Latin small letter g with hook." How would you represent this? Does it have a name?

If you feel you don't know enought about Richard Cleasby who was the guiding spirit behind the first Old Norse-English dictionary, my new biographical article has just been published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography -- along with other lexicographers
@oxfordacademic.bsky.social

This is a stunning resource, beautifully presented - congratulations to Ros Smith Kathy Acheson and their team emwmlibrary.com

I remember in the '90s Carl Berkhout used to give a paper at Kalamazoo every year in which he read in a deadpan voice from newly-edited bits of Laurence Nowell's diaries. Most memorable: a trip that was not going well. "Heu, cecidi in lacum."

Our friends at the Early English Text Society are holding a workshop on editing texts from medieval Britain for graduate students and early career scholars.

📖Texts in Transition
📍St Hilda's College, Oxford
📆18/04/2026
🕐11am-5pm

For registration email eets[at]ell.ox.ac.uk

Love on the Victorian Telegraph Wire

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrated their #telegraph #OnThisDay in 1838.

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers found social freedoms.

🔓 This archive article is free for 7 days

www.historytoday.com/archive/feat...

Madden1826 Frederic Madden's Journal, 1826

The life of Frederic Madden, in his words, 200 years after the events described. Transcribed from his journal by students @ies-sas.bsky.social. Released daily in 2026.👇
madden1826.com

I should have guessed you would! But yes, from a quick skim of it, mote is recorded in ME as a past participle but not (at least in OED or MED) as simple past.

Meted all the way, but if you curious you want www.oed.com/dictionary/m... (sense 5 and see also the forms tab).

Can recommend if you feel the need to listen to piano performances of some of the major variants!

A truly excellent graph! Have you seen the video by Tom Scott about this song? youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4?... You have collected some interesting variants he doesn't mention, though.

The packaging for a "Surprise Makiki Doll with keychain". In defiance of the bouba-kiki effect, the Makiki has large round eyes and rounded features.

Speaking as a linguist, I just feel this knock-off Labubu should be spikier, somehow...

Reviews: Holiday Special 2025. SFX magazine, p. 101. The Wolf and His King. 4 stars. Released: Out Now. 339 pages. Hardback / ebook / audiobook. Author: Finn Longman. Publisher: Gollancz. Fantasy novels inspired by classic myths and medieval tales are nothing new, but this one, a queer retelling of the 12th century French tale of Bisclavret, written down by Marie de France, manages to feel fresh and modern. Bisclavret is a garwolf, a man who changes unpredictably into a wolf at night, with no control over the changes or his actions. When the old king dies and the prince is crowned, his cousin urges him to rejoin court life, reclaim the lands lost to his father, and live again. Bisclavret is terrified of revealing himself, but drawn by childhood dreams of knighthood and belonging. Meanwhile, the young king, recently returned from exile, is fascinated by this new knight, unable to resist every opportunity to be with him. It’s a beautiful, lyrical tale of love, betrayal and above all, yearning. Strikingly, no one is named except Bisclavret – we have a cousin, a king, a ward, a knight in green – and yet this never feels forced or unreal, but adds to the mythological, folk tale feel. This is a queer romance that refreshingly combines an acceptance of sexuality with the needs of nobles in a medieval time to marry and have children, while speaking to universal human desires for love, friendship and safety. Rhian Drinkwater

SFX Magazine liked my book!

finnlongman.com/books/the-wo...

I also read "surely see", fwiw, though if that's the case it's a rather blotchy u.

Slightly more recently, try Alexander McCall Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs for some excellent academic humour, though the main character is the butt of the jokes in a way that doesn't really lend itself to a happy ending.

In that case, it's even older than Wodehouse, but Three Men in a Boat is a classic book of virtually no stakes and virtually all jokes. No good for market research but well worth reading if you haven't.

A forgotten Dutch medievalist? Tracing the influence of Cornelis Stoffel (1845–1908) in Old and Middle English studies Not all academic work leaves its mark in bibliographies. Looking for traces of other kinds of scholarly engagement can broaden our understanding of our field and the people who have contributed to it.

I wrote a short blog post on the little-known Dutch scholar Cornelis Stoffel and why people like him are interesting when thinking about the history of scholarship:
www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/a-f...

These were actually the articles that got me started on the Lappenberg connection - really interesting, both of them!

Make sure you book a late train home on Thursday to be able to see all three panels on Old English in the 19th Century at #IMC2026!

Thank you both for bringing this to my attention! I asked our library to buy a copy of the Grimm-Lappenberg correspondence a while ago, and this reminded me that I never checked whether the order had gone through. (It has, hurrah!)

Appel à articles : Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism Following the Chaucer: Here and Now exhibition (2023–2024) at the Bodleian Library, the conference Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism—sponsored by the Modernités médiévales association and the New Chau...

Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism needs you! In the wake of our conference, we are now preparing a collective volume and seeking additional chapters to complement the proceedings. Please share widely!

#medievalsky

modmed.hypotheses.org/8517

Mappa Mundi & Chained Library Museum. Shaping Early Medieval Faith: The Hereford Gospels. Monday 30 March-Saturday 12 September 2026. Discover the inner life of the oldest manuscript at Hereford Cathedral, the Hereford Gospels. Made circa 800AD, the Hereford Gospels symbolise the continuity of the the community at Hereford Cathedral. Shaping Early Medieval Faith explores how the Gospels were created through the centuries. It shares the results of new scientific imaging which has revealed secrets hidden within the manuscript's pages. Alongside the Gospels themselves are some of the oldest texts in the chained library, chosen to show what early medieval Christians might have been listening to or reading. Monday-Saturday, 10am-5 pm.

If you love insular manuscripts & have always wanted to visit Hereford Cathedral's chained library, 2026 is the year to come! Shaping Early Medieval Faith: The Hereford Gospels will run 30 March-12 September 2026. More details, including about the manuscript's palimpsest, coming soon.

Dictionaries 46:2 (2025) is now available (open access!) on
@projectmuse.bsky.social
Read here about: Arabic in China, Wittgenstein & Austrian German, etymology, Georgian learner-lexicography, antedating & linguistics pedagogy + Cambridge Handbook of the Dictionary review

muse.jhu.edu/issue/55471

Also worth bearing in mind that the Cambridge WOTY choice is based on user lookups; interest spiked in 2025, but there had to be enough existing evidence of usage for "parasocial" to have made it into the dictionary *to* be looked up!

The Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2025 Cambridge Dictionary has announced parasocial as its Word of the Year 2025. Learn what parasocial relationships mean in social media, AI companions, fandom culture and celebrity obsession.

Cambridge Dictionary #WOTY 2025 is "parasocial" (a word my autocorrect hasn't quite got to grips with yet...): dictionary.cambridge.org/editorial/wo...