Two Personal Names in Recently Found Anglo-Saxon Runic Inscriptions: Sedgeford (Norfolk) and Elsted (West Sussex)
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John Hines
Abstract
In 2017 two objects carrying runic inscriptions that are identifiable as personal names were found. Both date to the ninth century; both are dithematic (compound) names. The object identified as a spoon or fork handle from Sedgeford in Norfolk bears a familiar male name, Biarnferð. This contains a runic graph hitherto unseen, which may, despite the provenance of the find, be interpreted as a representation of the diphthong ia that developed in the Kentish dialect by the middle of the ninth century. There is in fact a historically known individual of this name who witnessed a series of Canterbury charters in the mid-ninth century. The other object, a strap-end from Elsted in West Sussex, carries what can be identified from its final element, ‑flǣd, as a female name, although the whole name cannot be read. What is legible cannot be identified with any previously recorded personal name. Evaluation of these finds emphasizes how Anglo-Saxon runic writing practice continued to adapt to changes in the language and the regularization of roman-script literacy in the ninth century. Finally, the role of literacy within a nexus of cultural relationship involving individuals and artefacts is also highlighted.
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- Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds
- New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑
- Two Personal Names in Recently Found Anglo-Saxon Runic Inscriptions: Sedgeford (Norfolk) and Elsted (West Sussex)
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds
- New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑
- Two Personal Names in Recently Found Anglo-Saxon Runic Inscriptions: Sedgeford (Norfolk) and Elsted (West Sussex)
- A Reconsideration of the Dialectal Provenance of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57
- Reviews
- Ivor Timmis. 2018. Historical Spoken Language Research: Corpus Perspectives. Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, 206 pp., £ 110.00.
- Ciaran Arthur. 2018. ‘Charms’, Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 32. Woodbridge: Boydell, viii + 252 pp., 3 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Jewel Spears Brooker. 2018. T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. Hopkins Studies in Modernism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 215 pp., $ 49.95.
- Nina Engelhardt. 2018. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200 pp., £ 75.00.
- Philipp Schweighauser. 2016. Beautiful Deceptions – European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 264 pp., $ 45.00.
- Michaela Keck. 2018. Deliberately Out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classic Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Heidelberg: Winter, 363 pp., € 45.00.
- Rüdiger Kunow. 2018. Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States. Heidelberg: Winter, xx + 483 pp., € 66.00.
- Verena Jain-Warden. 2017. Pain and Pleasure: The Representation of Bodies and Emotions in Contemporary South African Novels. Reflections: Literatures in English outside Britain and the USA 25. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 226 pp., € 27.50.
- Sandra Stadler. 2017. South African Young Adult Literature in English, 2000–2014. Studien zur europäischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (SEKL)/Studies in European Children's and Young Adult Literature 4. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, iv + 223 pp., € 35.00.
