Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe

HA is now the Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe

We have changed our name to Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (JEMNE). We've updated our domain to jemne.org and our mission statement. Links to articles published under The Heroic Age will continue to function without change.

We hope you share our excitement as we transition!

Mission

JEMNE is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the exploration of all aspects of early medieval Northwestern Europe from c. 300–c. 1400. Our mission is to provide a forum for the investigation of the histories, cultures, and peoples of the medieval North Atlantic and North Sea regions in their local, intercultural, and global contexts. We seek to publish work using a variety of methodologies and frameworks both emergent and traditional. We welcome innovative approaches to the field.

Issue 22

03-Feb-2026

A Stemma of Sigurgarðs saga frækna, and a Case Study of Saga-Anthologization

Alaric Hall (University of Leeds), Alaric Hall (University of Leeds), Sheryl McDonald (University of Copenhagen), Hervin Fernandez-Aceves (Universidad Panamericana / El Colegio de Jalisco), Katelin Marit Parsons (University of Iceland and Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), and Ian Simpson (Independent Scholar)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18475600

Abstract: This article publishes the first stemma of the manuscripts of the fifteenth-century Icelandic romance Sigurgarðs saga frækna, taking in 58 of the 61 known witnesses. It capitalizes on digitally-native publication to publish all underlying data, presenting a fully open-data approach to stemmatics. The article shows how the post-medieval transmission of the saga supports previous claims about how Icelandic sagas in this genre circulated but also takes manuscripts containing Sigurgarðs saga frækna produced in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in the Dalir region of Iceland as a case study for a methodologically novel investigation of how scribes went about anthologization. Refining previous work on the manuscript filiations of Ambrósíus saga og Rósamundu, Sigurðar saga turnara, Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, Nítíða saga, and Konráðs saga keisarasonar, and making the first outline of a stemma of Nikulás saga leikara, the study gives our first systematic insight into how the scribes of the eighteenth-century manuscript Rask 32 assembled their anthology, and how their work influenced subsequent anthologies that drew material from that manuscript.

03-Feb-2026

“The Ancient Tradition of our Elders”: A Structural Analysis of the Historia Brittonum

Edwin Pace (Independent Scholar)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18475808

Abstract: Analysis of the structure of the Historia Brittonum suggests that an extended, very early account of British history is embedded therein. This account began with Britain’s founding by Britto, included at least seven Roman emperors, and ended with the military exploits of the Post-Roman figures Arthur and Guorthemir. In the Ninth century the historian Nennius then dismantled this original account and dispersed its various parts to their present positions. The HB56 citation about an alternate victor for the battle of Badon, which refuted the earlier historians Gildas and Bede, fully explains Nennius’ frustration with Insular historians in the Historia Brittonum’s Prologue. Most important, reassembling these narratives into their original sequence provides one of the earliest Insular accounts of events in Post-Roman Britain.

25-Mar-2026

A Translation of the Old English Biblical Poem Judith

Joseph St. John (Independent Scholar)

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19223014

Abstract: This translation of Judith, which has been written with reference to the Old English version of the text edited by R. D. Fulk, seeks to reproduce the meaning of the original as closely as possible, while capturing some of its style and diction. The Critical Preface preceding the translation sets out the poem’s manuscript context and discusses the text’s relation to the monstrous, its rendition of heroic values, as well as its affinities with the biblical and hagiographical traditions. The translation is also followed by an imaginative rendering of the lost lines of Judith, which opens mid-sentence in what must have been fitt IX. The philosophy behind this imaginative rendering is explained in the Critical Preface with reference, inter alia, to previous commentators’ views on the missing portion of the poem.

Lucius Artorius Castus, Part 2: The Battles in Britain

Linda A. Malcor (Aliso Viejo, California)

Abstract: Even though Lucius Artorius Castus lived in the second century, his biography provides a number of parallels with King Arthur. In this part of the series, I present the parallels between Castus and Arthur's traditional battle list.

Holocene Relative Sea-Level Changes in Western Scotland: The Early Insular Situation of Dun Add (Kintyre) and Dumbarton Rock (Strathclyde)

Richard Lathe & David Smith (Pieta Research, Edinburgh, UK/State University of Pushchino, Russia & School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, UK)

Abstract: Dun Add, an important center of the Dalriadic Scots, was established on a rocky outcrop that now protrudes from the land-locked flats of Crinan Moss, an unlikely situation for a defensive fortification. Given well-established post-glacial changes in sea levels, the outcrop was clearly once an island in Crinan Bay; however, it is not known whether the stronghold was first constructed on an island or later, when falling sea-levels had already abandoned the outcrop above the shoreline. Consideration of the present situation of the site above local mean sea level, the extent of peat deposition overlying buried estuarine terraces, and post-glacial uplift in the vicinity, indicates that when the fortification was first constructed (circa 300 BC) the outcrop was largely surrounded by the sea, and retained promontory or island status as late as AD 460–770. To validate uplift data, relative sea-level changes were compared against historical records for Dumbarton Rock. These records (i) provide independent validation of the model for local post-glacial uplift and (ii) demonstrate that the first fortifications at this second site, in or before the sixth century, were also constructed when the outcrop was an island. Post-glacial uplift could have contributed to recorded siege and seizure of Dun Add in the sixth/seventh centuries.