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Showing posts from February, 2011

Christmas Wales and Oxford

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So as one final trip before Christine returned to America to finish her degree, she Peter and I took a trip to Wales. We celebrated Christmas in Cambridge then left the next day. The trip was full of adventure and beauty, but my favorite was spending two nights with a beautiful family in Wales who were kind enough to let us eat the traditional Boxing Day dinner with them. They lived in a secluded Welsh farmhouse with a fireplace big enough for us to walk around in. Afterwards we visited St. Davids Cathedral and drove up the Welsh coast to Snowdonia, traditional birthplace of King Arthur. On the way back to Cambridge we stopped off at Stonehenge and took the guided tour. The mist was our constant companion on our trip, and it added a layer of mystique. We spent a couple days in Wales, a day in Bath, and on our way home stopped at Stonehenge. Bath was beautiful. Lyndon and I had finished reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey which takes place

Anglo-Saxon Norse Celtic Studies

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So Christine has left England to finish her studies at BYU and I am here finishing my degree alone. So I've decided to make my mark on our blog and inform the world about my studies. I am pursuing a Masters of Philosophy (MPhil for short) in Anglo-Saxon Norse Celtic studies. As the name suggests it incorporates a broad area of emphases from history to ancient languages to paleography to numismatism (studying coins). Specifically I study Insular Latin (that variety used in England), Anglo-Saxon History, and the literary and academic written works of the English, Norse, and Celts (and some Roman) from 300 AD to 1200 AD roughly. So Bede, Beowulf, Norse Sagas, Geoffry of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, Eusebius, and the lives of many a saint come within our perview. My dissertation, which will command the majority of my time while here at Cambridge, is taking a very close view of a law code issued by King Cnut and drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in 1020 AD. The code is exc