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The viking image has changed dramatically over the centuries, romanticized in the 18th and 19 century, they are now alternatively portrayed as savage and violent heathens or adventurous explorers. Stereotypes and clichés are rampant in popular culture and vikings and their influence appear to various extents, from Wagner's Ring Cycle to the comic Hägar the Horrible, and J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to Marvel's Thor. But what is actually true? Eleanor Barraclough lifts the lid on ten common viking myths.

The post 10 myths about the vikings appeared first on OUPblog.

Norway has a peculiar and unique tradition in the comics field. Every November, several dozen special comic books are published to gear Norwegians of all ages up to Christmas. Learn about the Norwegian phenomenon of Christmas comics.

It’s hard to believe there are people more in love with ghost hunting that basic cable channels that program various paranormal investigation shows nearly 24/7 but it seems that ghost hunting has taken hold in normally secular Norway: Ghosts, or at least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found […]

This is an example of one of those drawings that pisses me off. Actually, it's myself that pisses me off. I cannot blame the drawing. I piss myself off for not knowing where to stop. Originally, I set out to draw a nice piece of lined paper, a pen and a little bit of a brainstorming doodling session. That was it. But part of the way into it I started seeing a brain, and then the sea, and some land, and I just kept adding layer upon layer until I ended up with what looks like a bloody pirates map. Not that I've ever seen a pirates map. Then, I was so annoyed I smudged it all with my sleeve. Purposely, I should add.

I don't know what else to say.

This is an X-ray of my head right now. That's exactly what's going on in there at the moment. I get on into a project and I live and breathe it.

I was hoping to post this drawing over the weekend but it took far longer than I'd anticipated. I reckon there's, at a guess, around 16-20 hours work in this spread. I suppose in the grand old scheme of things that's not so long. When you think of how long people take making books or albums then it's a drop in the ocean.

I often think about the making of an album when, late at night when the rest of the world is dreaming, I'm scribbling away creating this crazy stuff. I suppose it's a way of comforting myself. Have you ever seen the film about the making of a Springsteen album ('The Promise; The Making of the Darkness at the Edge of Town')? It's all about that crazy obsessive manic compulsive demanding compelling destructive beautiful creative drive. I bloody love that film, mainly because it reminds me that I'm not alone.

I also think that if I were making an album I would not want to listen to it for at least a year after it's completion. I'm just putting this sketchbook away for a couple of days.

So, lets get this show on the road. As I promised in an earlier post I'd share this new project I'm embarking on. It's basically a new sketchbook idea. A travelogue.

But, it's so much more than another sketchbook to me. When you consider that some of my Moleskine projects have taken as long as four years to complete then you might get an idea of how much I invest into them.

I always theme my sketchbooks too. I know it's obsessive but I see them as a whole, not a series of drawings. So, this is a project that I intend to get lost in. To obsess over. All for the love of it. I can't think of a better reason to do anything.

The idea is that I create a new travel journal. A carne t de voyage. But with a twist. I'm going to journal about places that I have never even visited. Yes. If you'd like to read more then click on the pages. This is the story so far. Hope you join me on this trip.

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By Lisa Collinson

‘Few etymologies are perfect. Neither is this one. Yet it may be right.’

So wrote the eminent scholar Anatoly Liberman in 2007, in a beautifully-crafted OUPblog post entitled ‘Hamlet and Other Lads and Lasses: Or, From Rags to Riches’. That post explored the origins of the name of Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, and – with wonderful spark and spirit – revived an old theory that ‘Am-lothi … is the correct division [of the name], with Am- and loth- being related to Engl. em(ber), and lad respectively (-i is an ending).’ The name ‘ember boy’ as a whole was, Liberman noted, suggestive of ‘a despised third son of fairy tales, known in British folklore as Boots.’

This wholly Germanic etymology may, indeed, be right. But, in an article published online last week in the OUP journal Review of English Studies, I have set out my own  – no doubt even less perfect – theory, which I hope will be of as much interest to artists of various kinds as to scholarly specialists.

In this new article, I conclude that Hamlet probably came ultimately from Gaelic Admlithi: a name attached to a player (or ‘mocker’) in a strange and violent medieval Irish tale known in English as ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. If I’m right, this means that some version of the Hamlet-name was associated with players hundreds of years before Shakespeare lived or wrote.

What does Admlithi mean? It has proved tough to translate – particularly for me, as a specialist in Old Norse, rather than Gaelic. But once I’d found the name (sent to me years ago by a friend who knew I had an interest in medieval player-figures), it was impossible to let go. Partly, this had to do with the fact that it clearly had something to do with the concept of grinding, which I knew was a key element in two important early Nordic ‘Hamlet’ texts; but which also seemed to have plenty of powerful cultural potential of its own. (Just think of the range of its contemporary connotations!) In the end, I plumped for not one but three weird-yet-interesting interpretations of Admlithi: Great Grindings; Greatly Ground (plural); Due-To-Be-Greatly Ground.

But what did these really mean, in the Middle Ages? To Gaelic-speakers? To Norse-speakers? To people who spoke bits of both languages?

Once I started asking these questions in earnest, one of the answers I found was that yes, Gaelic words connected with grinding probably did (as we might guess) suggest violence, or sexual activity. But they could also imply low or ambiguous social status: sometimes linked to gender, sometimes to categorization as a ‘fool’ of some kind. In other words, use of the peculiar name Admlithi – grammatically hazy, yet bursting with meaning – could probably have said more about the character tagged with it than lines and lines of straightforward description. Just as well, in fact, for Admlithi has scarcely been mentioned in surviving versions of ‘Da Derga’s Hostel’ before he’s gone – out of the picture entirely.

So … Was this Irish player, Admlithi, Hamlet?

No!

Hamlet is Hamlet!

But, as I discuss in the RES article, I do think there is a fair possibility that Gaelic Admlithi was known as a player-name in medieval Scandinavia, and that this somehow contributed to the development of a riddling figure called Amlethus, long identified as an early version of the