Matthew Townend

Profile

Biography

Matthew Townend’s research interests are in Old Norse language and literature (especially poetry); the history and culture of Viking Age England; and medievalism and philology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He is the author of English Place-Names in Skaldic Verse (1998), Language and History in Viking Age England (2002), The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: the Norse medievalism of W.G. Collingwood and his contemporaries (2009), and Viking Age Yorkshire (2014), and he is currently writing a book about the Victorians and the study of dialect.

Research

Overview

My general interests are in Old Norse language and literature, and also Old English and Middle English. I am particularly interested in the language, literature, and history of Viking Age England, and in Old Norse poetry (especially skaldic). I have written widely on Norse-English contacts between the ninth and eleventh centuries, and have edited the skaldic poems composed in honour of King Cnut. My most recent book is an interdisciplinary history of Viking Age Yorkshire.

I am also interested in the post-medieval reception of the Middle Ages, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the relationship between philology and literature. I have written a book about the author and artist W.G. Collingwood (1854-1932) and the study of the Vikings in the Lake District, and I am currently working on a book about 'regional philology' in the nineteenth century - that is, how the Victorian study of dialect was not only historicist but also thoroughly medievalist. I am interested in questions of language, identity, and the regional past, both in the Middle Ages and the modern period.

Supervision

I am interested in supervising research in any area of Old Norse studies, and also in nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism. Current and recent PhD topics supervised include: maps in medieval Iceland; the English language in medieval Scandinavia; Old Norse landscape poetry; animal-human relations in medieval Iceland; history and poetry in the Old Norse legendary sagas; the vocabulary of wisdom in Old Norse poetry; the 'post-classical' Icelandic sagas; connections between Old Norse legendary sagas and Middle English romance; the reception of St Guthlac from the medieval period to the present day; and twentieth-century alliterative poetry.