medieval

16 November 2024

That one time we baffled our lecturer with a surprise presentation

During my time studying for my bachelor’s degree, I had a few favorite lecturers. One of them was a very chill old guy who was teaching one of his last seminars before retirement. He had been with the university basically since it was built, and he loved to tell stories not only about his field of research (medieval English literature, history and language), but also about the university and how its students changed throughout the decades. I remember than in one of the sessions he was a bit disappointed with us, because nobody really prepared for it very well. I […]

17 January 2013

How the Scandinavians shaped England

Exam time is coming up, that means it’s time for another verbose blog entry about the history of English stuff – in this case, the vikings (yes!). English, though rooted in the West Germanic family, has had significant influence from the Old Norse language (part of the North Germanic language family). So much, that a Norwegian professor even claims that English is a Scandinavian language. That’s of course ridiculous, you could just as well claim that English is a Romance language because of its huge amount of French influence. But the language is still very Germanic at heart. As Bill […]

8 March 2010

History: Contains Spoilers for Rome and The Tudors.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the TV shows Rome and The Tudors! Cesar is stabbed! Anne Boleyn loses her head! So what is the point in watching those shows, you say? Well, when not written by a dull and dry textbook author, history can be very exciting (and much more cruel than any splatter film you can think of). Rome was a truly epic TV show – so epic, that the producers couldn’t afford to do more than two seasons of it – and we’re talking about HBO and the BBC here. Which is quite sad, because towards the […]