Islands and Islandness: a Poetry Workshop with Charlotte Eichler

On Thursday 20th February Charlotte Eichler, the Ragna’s Islands poet in residence, will be running an online poetry workshop with an ‘islands’ theme! The workshop is aimed at beginners and experienced writers alike, as well as the merely curious. It will be a friendly and relaxed session with plenty of writing time and the chance …

‘Cancelled, no room to write’!

The Ordnance Survey Name Books are a valuable and productive resource for place-names research… but for places like the small island of Fair Isle it seems there just wasn’t enough room to write all the names that were collected onto the map! A bit of background first: these books contain place-name information and the sources …

Who is Ragna, What is She?

Readers of this blog might be wondering why our project is named after Ragna, a slightly obscure woman, and what her islands were. In fact, while the female characters of the Saga of the Earls of Orkney play a much more low-key role than the many warlike, poetical, ambiguous, saintly or evil male characters, the …

Ragna’s Islands: A New Saga

  Ragna’s Islands is the latest in a series of AHRC-funded projects initiated by The Centre for the Study of the Viking Age exploring the Viking Age history and Norse culture of different parts of Britain and Ireland. In 2013-14, Languages, Myths and Finds sent teams of academics and students to Cleveland, Dublin, the Hebrides, the Isle of …