Stevns is a peninsula in South Eastern Zeeland in Denmark. Flat, although it raises towards the east, where it breaks into the sea in the form of high cliffs, it has recently been suggested as the location for Heorot, the hall of Hrodgar, and the home of Grendel. What did it look like in the 6th to 10th century?
In 1962 an Alemannic graveyard in Niederstotzingen in Southern Germany was discovered and excavated. The graves of thirteen individuals – ten male adults and three infants - were buried with an array of inscribed horse gear, jewellery, arms and swords. In the graveyard, the archaeologists also found three horses buried.
Recently the human remains from 41 graves from six early medieval cemeteries in Southern Bavaria yielded genomic data showing that while men generally had ancestry resembling northern or central Europeans, the women exhibited a very high genetic heterogeneity.
For some time an international and interdisciplinary group of archaeologists, scientists, and historians have worked to uncover the minutiae of the Longobard invasion of Italy in AD 568. Genetic explorations are shedding extremely important new light on the linkage between genetics and cultural profiles.
When winter came to Italy in the 6th century, people took to the hills and had to find new ways of surviving. This changed their subsistence and diet.
"Fara" is an enigmatic term. Traditionally meant to designate an Germanic agnatic clan or lineage as well as a band of brothers, the meaning still eludes us.
When the famous Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heayney, took upon himself to translate Beowulf, he also made the poem a fashionable part of the medieval circuit. The wider question raised in a new book is what it takes to "perform beowulf"?