Supervisor: Professor Francis Leneghan
Thesis title: Soul, Body and Judgement Day in Old English Poetry
Research interests: Old English literature; Beowulf; Characterisation of Judgement Day in Old English poetry; Germanic heroic culture and literature; Old Norse-Icelandic literature; Medievalism; J. R. R. Tolkien
My thesis examines how the corpus of Old English poetry interprets the ideas of Soul and Body in relation to Judgement day. Doomsday was a constant concern in the Old English tradition, with certain periods of heightened anxiety, as Judgement Day was expected to take place twice during the compiling of the Old English poetic corpus (the years 800 and 1000). I hope to present a Doomsday-centric reading of several Old English poems, with a particular focus on the Soul and Body poems, as well as the main corpus of eschatological and hagiographical poems.
Publications:
- Englund, Anine Olsen, "Michael Fox, Following the Formula in 'Beowulf', 'Örvar-Odds Saga', and Tolkien" (review), Journal of Inkling Studies, 12 (2022), 271-273.