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 […]

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 […]