What I really love about ASNaC is the
fact that it's a small community and
it's a relatively small department
everyone really gets to know each other
just makes it really nice place to work
For me I'd say that it's really about
the lecturers being at the cutting edge
of their research, so in a lecture you
have the best of the best giving it to you
but despite that it's still a very
friendly environment and there's always
some cracking banter as
well as learning going on
Favourite thing about ASNaC is
the sheer scope of things you can choose
from the literature, the
language, the history
You really, really tailor the
course to what you love the most
My favourite part about ASNaC is how
interdisciplinary it is, both in terms of
the different languages you can study
you can look at Germanic languages
Celtic languages, you can look at Latin
This is a bit of a message describing
how that are the demons are coming to
attack Guthlac in his Hermitage and
they're described as coming with
‘clamoribus raucisonis’
‘hasgrumelum’ in Old English –  ‘hasgrumelum’
I get to study some of
the best Welsh poetry and just the best
poetry ever written and I get to look at
why it works so well and how the poet's
artistry works and that kinda makes me
feel like I'm part of it, like I'm part
of that poetic process
In all kinds of ways it's really
encompasses the kind of
the cultural connections between Britain
and Ireland but then in this case also
between England and the continent
so it's a cultural treasure
In the annals you can see
sort of a coming together of
historical and literary traditions and
also this medieval aspiration to fit a
nation's history into
biblical and world history
which I think gives you an idea
of sort of actual individual scribes and
authors seeing they're creating these
texts and it gives it a much
more humanising element
Because it's very
varied in its disciplines and because you
get this
really good foundation
of all those disciplines
after the degree you can go
into any of those
directions that you want
If you look at look up Norse
literature online you'll get sort of the eddas
a few sagas and then you come here
and because of all the library resources
you realise there's just
so much out there
anything you could want
So the ASNaC course lets me develop my
passion for the reign of Alfred the Great
we get to explore key primary
sources from his reign, which tell us all
about the origins of England
as a single Kingdom
So here we have an annal
towards the end of the 9th century
describing King Alfred fighting the Vikings
the crucial moment as he's about
to see off Guthrum and the
Viking horde and it's kinda
almost no less real up-to-the-minute
than political press release,
here's Alfred having at the Vikings
For me I really enjoy being able to look into the
insular medieval texts and really pull
apart sort of what an author thinks both
in their formal works often in their
more personal writings such as letters
and so on, which I really enjoy something
able to give you a quite
personal touch the Middle Ages
I got to study the
medieval Irish voyage tales which are
these wonderfully creative otherworldly
voyages to islands across the Sea
Islands made of crystal, islands where
the birds sing with human voices
all sorts of wonderful islands like this
which were actually the inspiration for
CS Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader
What I found I enjoyed the most was
being able to see where different texts
and ideas and ways of thinking were
being transmitted and moving around
during the period and how you can map
this by you know who's writing what where
what are they copying
what do they think is interesting
it's all just one big mess of learning and
culture and intellectual creativity and
you know there's this moment of you know
everything is connected and that was
just really exciting
