Human faces with pointed ears: exploring lycanthropy in Early Anglo-Saxon England

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Lisa Brundle ◽  

In Early Anglo-Saxon England, Style I anthropomorphic and zoomorphic motifs played a key role in shaping identity and communicating ideas in a non-literate society. While the zoomorphic designs are well discussed, the meaning of the human element of Style I remains underexplored. This paper addresses this imbalance by examining a rare and overlooked group of anthropomorphic images: human faces with small, pointed ears depicted on fifth- to sixth-century female dress fittings recovered from archaeological contexts in eastern England. This paper identifies quadrupedal creatures as a stylistic parallel within the menagerie of Style I, including equine, lupine and porcine creatures. Although it is difficult to identify the character/s depicted with ears, there are notable affinities between the anthropomorphic masculine face with pointed ears and the ancient Germanic practice of warriors donning wolf and bear pelts. The facial motif with pointed ears appears on feminine metalwork within East Anglia, the historic region of the sixth-century Wuffingas (Little Wolf) dynasty – Wuffa being Wolf and the -ingas suffix meaning ‘people/descendants of Wuffa’. This paper explores this rare design with contextual information from pictorial and historical texts of shapeshifting and considers the relationship between this motif, the object, and the wearer/user.

Author(s):  
Chris Jones

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (13) ◽  
pp. 1589
Author(s):  
Yongkeun Hwang ◽  
Yanghoon Kim ◽  
Kyomin Jung

Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.


1972 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coles

SummaryThe evidence of human activity in the Somerset Levels in the first millennium B.C. consists of wooden trackways laid across areas of developing raised bog, and joining small settlements on the higher, drier lands of the Poldens and the Wedmore ridge. The excavation of one of these tracks, of the sixth century B.C., is described. Stray finds of weapons and tools continue to be made by peat-cutters and by archaeologists; the most recent of these finds are a hazelwood peg or truncheon, and a sycamore tent peg, of the fourth or third century B.C. The relationship of the trackways and other finds to the marshside villages at Meare remains to be established.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-27
Author(s):  
Wouter Egelmeers ◽  
Joris Vandendriessche

IMPORTING TEXTS FROM ABROAD Editors’ reuse of foreign historical texts in Dutch periodicals, 1780-1860 This article explores the ways in which the editors of five Dutch history journals and three magazines for general circulation copied historical texts from abroad, between 1780 and 1860. By comparing original texts with reprinted versions, we show that the editors’ work involved not only ‘passive’ duplication (reprinting in full), but also more active forms of intervention, from the selection of text fragments to their translation, modification or critical review. These varied editorial practices point to a broader creative process through which historical knowledge was tailored to an emerging and nationally-oriented academic audience. Editors here assumed the role of mediators, gatekeepers even in the sense that their judgment determined the very choice of texts. At a time when the study of history was evolving at both the national and international level, and when the relationship between actors making up the disciplinary field was also in flux, editors thus became influential figures.


Author(s):  
Ginta Pērle-Sīle

The subject of this article is a court case between Aumeisteri nobleman Berhard Magnus von Wulf (1732–1784) and the minister of Palsmane and Aumeisteri parishes Friedrich Daniel Wahr (1749–1827) about the suspension of the minister from his duties from 1775 to 1779. The aim of the research is to approach the court case as evidence of the different opinions of several social groups where extreme colonial ideas in Vidzeme meet Enlightenment ideas from Western Europe. At the same time, the court case is a source of contextual information for a better understanding of the development of Wahr’s literary and folkloristic heritage. The research is based on studies of documents found in the Latvian State History Archive that are approached using the culture-historical and comparative methods, thus trying to contextualize certain events in a specific place and time. The results of the research show the Palsmane and Aumeisteri society as typical of the second part of the 18th century. The existence of specific social groups, particularism, and the implementation of colonial attitudes by the local nobility are also evident. The attitude of Wahr towards Latvian peasants shows the influence of Enlightenment, especially his efforts in education. The relationship between the parish and its minister incorporates evidence of a syncretic praxis with pagan and Christian traditions. In the light of political events of that particular time, i. e. peasant rebels in Vidzeme, the court case allows Wulf’s accusations to be treated as an opportunity to decrease the implementation of Enlightenment ideas, thus safeguarding the local nobility’s power. At the same time, the court case is a source of biographic, private, and daily life details. The broad range of the parish territory which was often challenging to navigate, the modest means of the minister, and distancing of the local nobility on the one hand, along with the influence of enlightenment ideas, on the other hand, are the most probable grounding for Wahr’s folkloristic and literary work.


Author(s):  
Michael Jursa

This chapter examines the aftermath of the Persian conquest of Babylonia in the sixth century BCE. It explores the relationship of the Iranian rulers and the indigenous Babylonian urban upper class and analyses the effects of administrative change introduced by the Achaemenid rulers and their officials, especially in the realm of taxation. It suggests that Cyrus the Great and his administration had achieved continuity by securing the cooperation of the traditional Babylonian elite, specifically by honouring the long-standing claims of these families on important offices both in temple and state administration.


Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon

Writing in the early eighth century, Bede described how three separate peoples— the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—had settled in Britain some three hundred years earlier, and ever since the genesis of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ scholarship in the nineteenth century archaeologists have sought to identify discrete areas of Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlement (e.g. Leeds 1912; 1936; 1945; Fox 1923, 284–95). The identification of these peoples was based upon different artefact styles and burial rites, with most attention being paid to brooches. The degree of variation in the composition of brooch assemblages across eastern England is shown in Table 9.1. Cruciform brooches with cast side knobs, for example, were thought to have been ‘Anglian’, and saucer brooches ‘Saxon’ (although even in the early twentieth century Leeds (1912) had started to doubt the attribution of applied brooches to the West Saxons). In recent years, however, this traditional ‘culturehistorical’ approach towards interpreting the archaeological record has been questioned, as it is now recognized that, rather than being imported from mainland Europe during the early to mid fifth century, regional differences in artefact assemblages emerged over the course of the late fifth to late sixth centuries (e.g. Hines 1984; 1999; Hilund Nielsen 1995; Lucy 2000; Owen- Crocker 2004; 2011; Penn and Brugmann 2007; Walton Rogers 2007; Brugmann 2011; Dickinson 2011; Hills 2011). In early to mid fifth-century England, in contrast, it now appears that Germanic material culture was in fact relatively homogeneous, with objects typical of ‘Saxon’ areas on the continent being found in so-called ‘Anglian’ areas of England, and vice versa. The earliest material from East Anglia, for example—equal-arm, supporting-arm, and early cruciform brooches—are most closely paralleled in the Lower Elbe region of Saxony, with the distinctive ‘Anglian’ identity of EastAnglia onlyemerging through later contact with southern Scandinavia (Hines 1984; Carver 1989, 147, 152; Hills and Lucy 2013, 38–9). Indeed, many elements of the classic suite of early Anglo-Saxon material culture actually developed within Britain as opposed to having been created on the continent (Hills 2003, 104–7; Owen-Crocker 2004, 13), with new identities beingmade in Britain rather than being imported frommainland Europe (Hills 2011, 10).


Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon

During the early medieval period eastern England was occupied by two major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms—the East Saxons and East Angles—alongside a region that Bede referred to as ‘Middle Anglia’. There has been a widespread assumption that Essex (‘the East Saxons’) and Suffolk and Norfolk (the ‘South Folk’ and ‘North Folk’ of East Anglia) were direct successors to these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (e.g. Carver 1989, fig. 10.1; 2005, 498; Yorke 1990, 46, 61; Warner 1996, 4, plate 1; Pestell 2004, 12; Chester-Kadwell 2009, 46; Kemble 2012, 8; Gascoyne and Radford 2013, 176; Reynolds 2013, fig. 4), which would imply a strong degree of territorial continuity from at least the early medieval period through to the present day. There is, however, a recognition in the Regional Research Framework that regional differences within early medieval society across eastern England have seen little investigation (Medlycott 2011b, 58), something that the following chapters hope to address. This chapter will explore the documentary evidence for these early medieval kingdoms and their relationship to later counties, before turning to the archaeological evidence for Anglo- Saxon immigrants and their relationship to the native British population in Chapters 8–10. The clear differences between the Northern Thames Basin, East Anglia, and the South East Midlands that are still evident during the seventh to ninth centuries are outlined in Chapter 11. Finally, Chapter 12 explores the boundaries of the early medieval kingdoms, and in particular the series of dykes constructed in south-eastern Cambridgeshire.Table 7.1 provides a timeline of key historical dates for early medieval England, and key developments within the archaeological record. The earliest list of territorial entities is the Tribal Hidage. The original document has been lost—it only survives in a variety of later forms—but it is thought to have been written between the mid seventh and the ninth centuries (Hart 1970; 1977; Davies and Vierck 1974, 224–7; Yorke 1990, 10; Blair 1991, 8; 1999; Harrington and Welch 2014, 1). The Tribal Hidage lists at least thirteen peoples in and around eastern England, some of whom clearly occupied quite extensive areas, such as the East Angles (assessed as 30,000 hides), East Saxons (7,000 hides), and the Cilternsætna (4,000 hides).


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